Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory 0674238265, 9780674238268

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Magic and the Dignity of Man

Magic and the Dignity of Man

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Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory

br ia n p. c o pe nh av e r

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts, and London, ­England  2019

Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Jacket design: Jill Breitbarth Photo by Tom Quandt/Unsplash 9780674242180 (EPUB) 9780674242197 (MOBI) 9780674242173 (PDF) ἀ e Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Copenhaver, Brian P., author. Title: Magic and the dignity of man : Pico della Mirandola and his oration in modern memory / Brian P. Copenhaver. Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019017545 | ISBN 9780674238268 Subjects: LCSH: Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 1463–1494. De hominis dignitate. | Cabala and Chris­tian­ity—­Italy—­History—­To 1500. | Mysticism—­ History—­Middle Ages, 600–1500. | Mysticism—­Catholic Church. | Humanism—­ Italy—­Early works to 1800. Classification: LCC B785.P53 D4433 2019 | DDC 195—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2019017545

For Chris and Steve Hazy with gratitude and admiration

History, the ­mother of truth: the idea is staggering! —­borg es, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”

Contents

List of Figures ​  xiii Acknowl­edgments ​  xv

Introduction

1

pa r t o n e : dign it y   1 Vile Bodies and Naked Dignity 1. The Honored Dead ​  9 2. Missing Persons ​  18 3. Kant’s Dignity and Pico’s Dignitas ​  24 4. Manetti’s Dignitas 1 ​  31 5. Cicero’s Dignitas ​  34 6. Christian Dignitas ​  38 7. Manetti’s Dignitas 2 ​  45 8. Manetti’s Dignitas 3 ​  50 9. Beyond Freedom and Dignity? ​  55

9

pa r t t w o : stor i e s a bou t pico   2 Pico Dignified 1. Swiss Facts about Italy ​  71 2. Exalted Premonitions ​  83

71

  3 Pico Resurgent 1. Yorick, Papini, and Pico ​  92 2. Oreglia and the Blood Libel ​  96

92

ix

x

Contents

3. Festivities in Mirandola ​  102 4. Gentile’s Pico ​  105 5. Garin’s Pico ​  108 6. Gentile’s Pico Again ​  111 7. Anagnine’s Pico ​  112 8. Papini’s Kingdom ​  120

  4 Pico Existentialist or Actualist? 1. Gentile Dead or Alive? ​  128 2. Actualism and Autoctisis ​  134 3. Existentialism and Modernism ​  141 4. Against ‘Humanism’ ​  153

128

  5 Pico Sainted 1. Practicing Death ​  159 2. Two Epistolaries and a Hagiography ​  162 3. Reading for a Nun ​  169 4. Ficino’s Letters ​  178 5. Savonarola ​  183 6. First Letters from Pico ​  185 7. More Letters from Pico ​  187 8. Last Letters from Pico ​  189 9. Pico Boxes ​  192

159

  6 Pico Raving 1. Scholars and Syncretists ​  200 2. Judaizers and Stargazers ​  216 3. Schwärmer and Wound-­Worms ​  223

200

  7 Liberty, Enthusiasms, and Grace 1. Se vuol ballare Signor Contino . . . ​  231 2. Philosophy ­Dying ​  241 3. The Soul Has Wings ​  247

231

  8 Pico Reviled and Redeemed 1. Pico with Dignity? ​  255 2. Pico for Phi­los­o­phers and Theologians ​  261

255

  9 Pippa Passes Pico 1. En­glish Enthusiasms ​  276 2. The Italy of Savonarola Brown ​  287 3. Pictures of Pico ​  297

276



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Contents

10 Pico across the Seas and Back 1. Pico Our Paladin ​  311 2. A Textbook Case ​  318 3. A Hermetic Pico ​  323 4. Festivities Again in Mirandola ​  332

311

pa r t t h r e e : pico ’ s or ation 11 Pico Orates 1. Secrets and Codes ​  339 2. Abulafia’s Ladder ​  347 3. Counting on Flavius ​  351 4. Oration I, 1–10 ​  358 5. Oration II, 11–15 ​  367

339

12 Pico Consults and Disputes 1. Oration III, 16–19 ​  375 2. Oration III, 20–25 ​  380 3. Oration III, 26–32 ​  388 4. Oration III, 33–35 ​  397 5. Oration IV, 36–45 ​  404 6. Oration IV, 46–55 ​  409

375

13 Pico Defends Magic and Kabbalah 1. Oration V, 56–62 ​  420 2. Oration VI, 63–68 ​  429 3. Oration VII, 69–72 ​  446

420



451

Conclusion: Real Picos and Why They ­Matter

a ppe ndi x a ppe ndi x a ppe ndi x a ppe ndi x

a  ​Pico’s Oration ​  459 b  ​Contents of Pico’s 900 Conclusions ​  483 c  ​Se­lections from Pico’s 900 Conclusions ​  485 d  ​Glossary ​  502

Abbreviations ​  529 Notes ​  533 Bibliography ​  589 Illustration Credits ​  657 Index ​  659

Figures

 1 “Dance of Death,” Nuremberg Chronicles, 1493 ​  24  2 ἀ e Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, 1508–1512 ​  31  3 David, bronze by Donatello, Bargello, mid-­fifteenth ­century ​  54  4 The Trent blood libel, Nuremberg Chronicles, 1493 ​  100  5 The Bari Prefettura’s stamp on Anagnine’s book, 1937 ​  116  6 “The Torments of Hell,” Seelenwurzgarten, 1483 ​  165  7 “Death Takes a Nun,” Hans Holbein the Younger, 1538 ​  170  8 “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanat­i­cism,” Hogarth, 1762, detail ​  226  9 “Savonarola Brown,” Max Beerbohm, 1919 ​  277 10 Lorenzo and Isabella, John Millais, 1849 ​  293 11 “A Supper in the Rucellai Gardens,” Frederic Leighton, 1862 ​  296 12 Miracle of the Sacrament, Cosimo Rosselli, 1484–1486 ​  301 13 Miracle of the Sacrament, Rosselli, detail ​  302 14 Medal picturing Pico, attributed to Niccolò Fiorentino, before 1490 ​  304 15 Three Portraits of Pico ​  306 16 ἀ e Childhood of Pico della Mirandola, Paul Delaroche, 1842 ​  308 17 Ten Sefirot in the usual array ​  346 18 “Chameleon,” Alciato, Emblems, 1534 ​  363 19 Abraham travels south ​  401 20 Ethiopic characters in a manuscript of the Oration, before 1494 ​  442 21 Three Trinities in the Sefirot ​  445 22 Pico de Paperis Reads a Family Chronicle ​  456 xiii

Acknowl­edgments

­ ecause work on this book started long ago, I’ve had help from many more B ­people than I can remember and name. With g­ reat generosity, Chris and Steve Hazy funded the chair that I held at UCLA while I was researching and writing, when I also had support from Guggenheim and Getty Fellowships and from a UCLA sabbatical leave. Friends who have read complete drafts or long parts of the book at vari­ous stages of development have been very kind; their advice has made it much better than anything I could have done without them: Michael Allen, Sophia Catalano, Tony Grafton, Paul Grendler, Jim Hankins, Barbara Herman, Moshe Idel, Fabrizio Meroi, John Monfasani, and Ingrid Rowland. My warmest thanks also go to Stefano Baldassarri, Francesco Bausi, Crofton Black, Richard Blum, Francesco Borghesi, Giulio Busi, Saverio Campanini, Michele Ciliberto, Greg Copenhaver, Kathleen Copenhaver, Rebecca Copenhaver, Remy Debes, Harvey Goldman, Ken Gouwens, Greg Harwell, Daniel Kokin, Jill Kraye, Paul Kristeller, Gavin Lawrence, Fabrizio Lelli, Arthur Lesley, Hans Lottenbach, Ed Mahoney, David Marsh, Francesco Nappo, Calvin Normore, Brian Ogren, John O’Malley, Rocco Rubini, Erika Rummel, Charles Schmitt, Peter Stacey, Kevin Van Bladel, Cesare Vasoli, Perkin Walker, Lindsay ­Waters, Bob Westman, Ron Witt, and Frances Yates.

xv

Magic and the Dignity of Man

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Introduction

t h e pro j ­e c t that led to this book started about fifty years ago when I

sent a short piece about Kabbalah to Re­nais­sance Quarterly. I had noticed an early use of the Latin word Cabala—­in­ter­est­ing, but not momentous—­ and my reporting on this find was half-­baked. RQ was right to say no. The sting of rejection soon became a s timulus and caused me to learn more about Kabbalah, a good fit for research on magic that I was d ­ oing at the Warburg Institute. Perkin Walker—­then about as old as I a m now—­ inspired me at the Warburg. If this sage was studying Hebrew, how could I not join him?1 In 1977 the Warburg Journal published an article by me on Kabbalah. Meanwhile, I was learning about the history of philosophy and science from Charles Schmitt, who introduced me to Annals of Science. In 1980 Annals carried my article on Hebraica in the scientific revolution. For the next twenty years I kept working on Hebrew and reading about Kabbalah while also exploring the Hermetica. Soon I m et Moshe Idel, Gershom Scholem’s successor as the master of scholarship on Kabbalah. I owe what I’ve learned about Kabbalah to Idel, Scholem, and Chaim Wirszubski—­the last a pivotal figure for Pico’s story.2 Two syntheses of my subsequent work appeared in 2015: ἀ e Book of Magic collects texts in translation; Magic in Western Culture interprets some of them; both books start in antiquity and continue through the Enlightenment. In the preface to Magic in Western Culture, I mentioned 1

2

Introduction

two gaps in that book: Kabbalah and the person who first tried to explain it to Christians—­Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.3 This book, which supplies the missing pieces, is ambitious: I claim that the usual stories about Pico and his Oration are wrong. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 introduce ­those stories in their most influential variant, and more than half of the book examines other versions. The hero and villain of t­ hese tales is an icon of the cultural construct now called ‘humanism,’ which is at the heart of current conceptions (and misconceptions) of the period known as the ‘Re­nais­sance.’ Being wrong about Pico is to misunderstand, in some degree, ‘humanism’ in the ‘Re­nais­sance.’ The prob­lem might be trivial if the ­mistakes ­were ­matters of detail—­a bad date ­here, a name wrong ­there. But if Pico has been deeply misunderstood, the stakes are higher. Imagine that Attila was not the wrath of God, Richard was not lion-­ hearted, nor Mehmet a c onqueror. M ­ istakes about Pico have been like that—­transposed from annals of global conflict to quieter rec­ords of cultural and philosophical debate. The main prob­lem is that Pico never wrote an Oration about ­human dignity. Instead, he drafted (but never delivered) a speech to promote ascetic mysticism—­a way of life incompatible with ­human dignity, as modern thinkers (including experts on Pico) have used the word ‘dignity’ in En­glish and other vernaculars. And yet Pico’s fame now rests on a speech known as the Oration on the Dignity of Man. My book is about reputation, fame, and celebrity—­the celebrity of the Oration and its author during the five centuries since his death. The book’s bound­aries are larger, however: Cicero and B.  F. Skinner both figure in Chapter 1. Pico’s smaller story, and most of the evidence for it, first took shape around 1496, when Gianfrancesco Pico published a collection of his ­uncle’s writings along with a biography to introduce them. The elder Pico, born in 1463, had died in 1494. When events from his short life come into my story, t­ hese incidents belong to a character who is now famous, but the prince’s fame was not fully formed during his lifetime. And the story has not changed much since 1989, when Wirszubski’s transformative study of the prince’s Kabbalah was published. Wirszubski himself and Frances Yates had both died by then, Paul Kristeller was no longer writing about Pico, and Eugenio Garin’s final remarks about him w ­ ere nostalgia. Pico and his Oration are the core of my book, which always comes back to the speech and its author, though I s ometimes leave both to discuss humanism, Kabbalah, magic, philosophy, the Re­nais­sance, and other top-



Introduction

3

ics that have ­shaped the prince’s reputation and the Oration’s. My book’s motivation and some of its content are philosophical: Pico called himself a phi­los­o­pher and defended his claim. But his way of ­doing philosophy can be understood only with help from elsewhere—­from art history, biblical and classical philology, history, lit­er­a­ture, theology, and other subjects. The result is a philosophical history of philosophy as cultural history. For some phi­los­o­phers of yesteryear, this approach would be less helpful than it may be for Pico. And some phi­los­o­phers ­today may think it unhelpful for any history of philosophy: testing that proposition is an aim of the book.4 The book is a c ultural and philosophical history of philosophy or­ga­ nized partly by topic, partly by geography, and told à la longue durée—­ though not chronologically—­over more than five centuries. It is not an intellectual biography of Pico or a life and works: if it ­were, a chronological account might have been best. It is also not historiography or a history of influence: if it ­were, some dif­fer­ent pattern, not the one I h ave chosen, might have worked better—­focused on conflicts of interpretation, genealogies of ideas, and so on. Although the book does some of that, its main patterns are dif­fer­ent: they reflect my understanding of Pico’s unstable celebrity during the five centuries since his death and my reading of the message he meant the Oration to send. The speech is the focus of the book, which examines Pico’s other works only incidentally, as they bear on the Oration. Intellectual biographies of Pico—­large and small, ­whole books and parts of books—­crowd the libraries: this book discusses some of them but does not address all or even most of the im­mense bibliography, not even all the most impor­tant items. One provocative book was written not long ago by W. G. Craven: a study of Pico’s modern—­mainly twentieth-­century—­ reception, or­ga­nized by themes that Pico himself found impor­tant. ­There can be such meta-­stories about Pico—­books about books about his books—­ only ­because his celebrity is so large and has been so durable. Craven ­shaped a piece of Pico’s most recent celebrity, though not a big piece—no fault of Craven’s.5 My book studies Pico’s fame as it has changed over the very long haul. The changes have s­ haped and reshaped vari­ous facets of his reputation: Pico the prodigy can be distinguished from Pico the Kabbalist, the Kabbalist diff ers from the classicist, the classicist from the mystic, and so forth for the aristocrat, the ascetic, the enthusiast, the liberator, the scholar, and other roles. Vari­ous features of Pico’s celebrity reflecting vari­ous aspects of

4

Introduction

his work would have been one way to or­ga­nize the book, but I c hose another way. I started to think about Pico’s celebrity around the turn of the last millennium when I began work on new editions of the Oration and the 900 Conclusions. Neither is ready yet, though I h ave finished Giannozzo Manetti’s e­ arlier book on dignitas—­discussed in Chapter 1—­for the I Tatti Re­nais­sance Library. For a conference at Harvard’s I Tatti Center in 1999, I examined the Anglophone reaction—­beginning with Thomas More—to Pico’s magic and Kabbalah, which brought me back to a question that kept coming up, with never a good answer, whenever I talked to students and colleagues about the Oration: how to connect its first few pages with the rest of it? The question made me think about the famous Pico—­the one praised in so many textbooks—­famous mainly ­because of the Oration. My question became more focused: What is the topic of this speech—­a ll of it, not just the opening? The usual answer is ‘­human dignity,’ which I find hard to reconcile with the text.6 My initial research evolved into studies—­now Chapters 2 and 5 through 10—of Pico’s reception ­after his death, north of the Alps and across the Atlantic. When I presented a sketch of this material at I Tatti, Jim Hankins advised me to take the investigation back to Italy. Chapters 3 and 4 are my response, telling the story of Pico’s story in Italy from the Risorgimento through the pre­sent. In preparation, I worked with Rebecca Copenhaver on a related book, From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy, 1800–1950.7 In Chapter 1, a­ fter a prelude about honor and pedigree, I examine dignitas as Eu­ro­pe­ans in Pico’s day used this Latin word, which they learned from ­earlier Christians and even older pagans. Chapter 1 asserts in broad strokes what the rest of this book aims to demonstrate in detail: that Pico was not a prophet of our modern concept of dignity. To show why he could not have made such a prophecy, not just that he did not happen to make it, is one burden of this chapter on dignitas and ‘dignity’ as used by Cicero, Manetti, and o ­ thers through more recent times—­especially Kant. Th ­ ese preliminaries introduce the book’s pars destruens—­nine chapters to show who Pico was not by tracing conflicting stories about him. The pars construens comes in Chapters 11, 12, and 13, which analyze his Oration. The book is large, involving famous figures like Burckhardt, Gentile, Hegel, Heidegger, Kant, Sartre, Schiller, and Tiraboschi but also less familiar names like Anagnine, Bartoli, Buhle, Dulles, Greswell, Jesup, Kirk, and



Introduction

5

Oreglia. Appendix D is a glossary to identify persons and terms that might be obscure. The book is episodic and by no means exhaustive—­just one person’s incomplete view of Pico’s celebrity, arguing that his Oration is not about ­human dignity and freedom, despite so much said to the contrary for so long, if a c­ entury is a long time. Most statements about Pico as a champion of dignity have been made since World War  I, though the modern idea itself came out of the Enlightenment in works by Kant and Schiller. Chapters  7 and 8 e xamine their era in order to fill in the outline of modern dignity presented at the start of the book. Some distinctive (perhaps idiosyncratic) themes, types of evidence, and styles of narration recur throughout the book—my approaches to popu­lar storytelling, visual material, comedy, and what Leo Strauss called ‘esoteric writing.’ Popu­lar storytelling: Some long and short fiction, also some poetry, most textbooks and chronicles, all journalism, websites, travel guides, and many works of reference are ‘popu­lar’ in the sense of ‘simplified,’ dispensing with fine distinctions, careful reasoning, and extensive information in order to communicate quickly and sometimes widely. Since fame needs a big audience, and since my book is about Pico’s fame, I’ve looked for him not just in writing meant for experts but also in popu­lar lit­er­a­ture and art. Visual material: The second section of Chapter 1 introduces the ‘Pico Box’—an icon of the prince’s fame. In its vari­ous manifestations, the Box is a repository for words but also a v isual form, and I owe its name to Jim Hankins. This and other pieces of evidence which are pictorial—­not verbal or not only verbal—­are ele­ments of Pico’s celebrity, even though likenesses of phi­los­o­phers (Socrates is an exception) are not usually prominent in their stories. Comedy: Jokes may also seem out of place in scholarship that aspires to philology and philosophy, but comic moments in Pico’s story have formed his reputation ever since Voltaire tried to destroy it with mockery. Esoteric writing: That Pico meant to mystify his readers with esoteric writing is certain, ­because he tells us in the very texts, including the Oration, that he wrote in this elusive way—­just as Farabi and Maimonides told their readers the same ­thing and inspired Strauss to imitate them. Why has the Oration, along with the 900 Conclusions introduced by the speech, remained baffling for five centuries? One reason is that Pico got his wish: readers have been mystified. But I want to dissolve mysteries, not aggravate

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Introduction

them, which makes my approach to Pico not at all Straussian—or so I hope. In retelling tales told about Pico by so many p ­ eople, I have not given ­every story equal attention. Voltaire’s abuse made the prince seem ridicu­ lous, and the jokes are easy to get. They fill only a few paragraphs—on the same scale as Burckhardt’s unforgettable insights. But the power of Burckhardt’s intuitions is harder to account for than the eff ect of Voltaire’s wit: the needed analy­sis comes in Chapter 2. The stories about Pico that I have retold in most detail follow in Chapters  3 and 4—­modern Italian treatments of the prince produced during the Risorgimento, the Fascist regime, and their aftermath. Some Anglophone readers ­will find ­these stories unfamiliar, I believe, and informative—­I hope. Appendices A, B, and C p rovide a t ranslation of the Oration and se­lections from the 900 Conclusions so that readers can compare what Pico said to what I say about his t­ heses and his speech in Chapters 11, 12, and 13. Elsewhere all translations are mine u ­ nless other­wise indicated. Pico was infamous for a year or two while he lived—­after Rome blocked his preposterous proj­ect in the early days of 1487—­and he was becoming famous by the time he died in 1494. His fame is greater now, if not what it was fifty years ago. ­People still recognize his name, usually as the author of a speech about h ­ uman dignity. For a l ong time a­ fter he died, however, many stories about him ignored the Oration. Most p ­ eople who praised the orator admired him instead for attacking astrology or inventing Christian Kabbalah or simply for being the won­der that he was when he came into the world and left it so quickly: a precocious aristocrat with astounding talent who died young—­a Mozart for phi­los­o­phers and philologists. How did the prince acquire his modern celebrity? The answers are most of my story about him, starting with myths, chronicles, and birds.

o ne

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pa r t

dignity

1

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Vile Bodies and Naked Dignity Our Lord Jesus Christ . . . ​­shall chaunge our vile body, that it may be lyke to his glorious body. —­ἀ e Book of Common Prayer

1. ​The Honored Dead Was Giovanni Pico a P hoenix? ­People have often said so. At any single moment, in all the world, ­there can have been just one bird so rare, an exotic won­der destined for a kind of immortality. ­After each unique Phoenix destroys itself in sweet-­smelling fire, having lived for five centuries, another rises from the ashes. Angelo Ambrogini of Montepulciano, the erudite poet better known as Poliziano, was another unusual talent. Birds ­were on his mind when he told Lorenzo de’ Medici his nickname for their mutual friend, Giovanni Pico: “not ‘woodpecker’ (picus) but rather ‘Phoenix,’ the one now nesting in your Laurel Tree. So much do I expect of him, Lauro, that I would actually dare sing, keeping in tune with Propertius, ‘move over, you writers from Rome, move over, Greeks!’ ”1 Many tellings of the Phoenix legend w ­ ere known when Poliziano wrote ­these lines of praise in 1489, and Pico was still three years short of thirty. Exactly what the older genius saw in this prodigious up-­and-­comer is hard to say. The expectations ­were ­great, plainly, and the flattery stuck. Almost five centuries l­ater, in 1948, when the University of Chicago Press published Pico’s Oration in En­glish, the speech was printed in Phoenix Books Number 1, the first release—­still selling ­after seventy years—of a n ew series. Demand eventually called for a paperback edition that introduced the Oration to many, many readers: tens of thousands, at least. This Phoenix is still making a bid for immortality.2 9

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dig n i t y

Thanks to Poliziano, Anglophone students of the Re­nais­sance have called Pico a Phoenix—­but not a woodpecker. An Italian woodpecker is a picchio, however, and a picus in Latin: hence Poliziano’s discriminating ornithology. As the leading classicist of his day, he knew the ancient texts where a picus had nested. Closer to our time, about a c­ entury ago, when philology and anthropology ­were still partners, experts on the Bible and Greco-­Roman my­thol­ogy ­were still chasing woodpeckers through old books. They noticed this entry in a medieval dictionary from Byzantium: “Pêkos—­also Zeus—­ died ­after passing the rule of the West on to Hermes, his own son. He lived 120  years, and as he was d ­ ying, he ordered his body to be buried on the island of Crete, where this is inscribed: ­here Pêkos, who is also Zeus, lies dead. Many have mentioned this tomb in their own writings.” The learned birdwatchers recognized the ancient Greek woodpecker as just that—­a dru-­kolaptês, an oak-­pecker—or sometimes an oak-­looker, dru-­ops, or sometimes a pelekas, a w oodworker. But the Pêkos in the inscription, Πῆκος ὁ καὶ Ζεύς, reminded them of picus, the Latin ‘woodpecker,’ which is close to pica or ‘magpie.’ Painted (pictus) a glossy black and white, magpies are seen all over Eu­rope, long-­tailed and clever; their chatter is distinctive too. The coat of the green woodpecker (Picus viridis) is not so striking, however, and its beak is too soft for loud pecking. Drycopus martius, the black woodpecker, is larger, with wings than can span 32 inches. Named for Mars and crowned in red, this big bird has a beak hard enough to dig deep into trees: hammering away to find food, the black woodpecker makes its own local thunder. Scholars who wondered why Pêkos was said to be Zeus heard an echo of this name in picus: like the sky-­god, the woodpecker made noises up in the air, and sometimes the rain came down. Like other birds, woodpeckers ­were watched by diviners. Since every­one talked about the weather, why not keep an eye on the birds and listen to them—­especially the thunderbirds?3 Saturnus |

Picus / Jupiter |

Faunus (Mars, Mercurius, Minerva, . . . ) |

Latinus



Vile Bodies and Naked Dignity

11

­ very classicist, if not e­ very schoolchild, knew that Aeneas rescued his E ­family gods from Troy’s ruins and carried them to Latium in Italy, where King Latinus ruled the Latins who spoke the language of Vergil’s epic. Latinus was the son of Faunus, whose ­father was Picus; and his ­father was Saturn—­Kronos in Greek, the f­ ather of Zeus or Jupiter. Picus and Jupiter shared a pa rent and belonged to the same generation of gods—­before Mars, Mercury, Minerva, and other Olympians—so maybe the inscription from Crete (where the infant Zeus was nursed) was right: maybe Picus was also Jupiter. He was at least as old as the primeval Italus, who gave Italy its name, and he was a ­horse tamer, armed with a staff and shield. But Circe’s wand and drugs w ­ ere stronger: her witchy magic changed the love-­struck Picus into a woodpecker.4 Ovid, in his epic of shape-­shifting, expanded Vergil’s story, adding bucolic and erotic decor. He also inserted a c haracter, the songstress Canens, to fill out the drama: only she, of all the dryads and naiads in Latium, managed to enchant Picus, who could love no other. He spurned even Circe’s dreadful charms ­until he saw feathers on his body and could not stand watching himself, right t­ here in the woods of Latium, suddenly changing, unheard of, into a bird, driving his tough beak into wild oaks.

Ovid added another detail that was sure to attract the birdwatchers: that the ancients had a statue of Picus “wearing a woodpecker on top.” Asking “why he wore a bird and why a shrine should be dedicated to him,” the poet also supplied answers.5 Ovid spelled ­these reasons out again in another long poem, the Festivals, about Rome’s religion and calendar. The king who first taught the City to worship was Numa. Needing Jupiter to rain blessings from the sky, but fearing the god’s stormy anger, the original Romans learned from Numa how to draw a thunderbolt down with ritual or how to avert its blast. A pair of woodland gods, Faunus and Picus, taught ­these rites to Numa ­under compulsion and deception, a­ fter the king got them drunk. Faunus had a goat’s horns and feet. What did Picus—­his companion—­look like? Maybe he was the red-­and-­black woodpecker (picus) sent by Mars to preside at Rome’s founding and feed the newborn Romulus and Remus. If Picus was resplendent at the City’s creation, surely he deserved his statue and shrine.6

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dig n i t y

Picus was a g lorious name wherever p ­ eople learned the language of Latium. And a picus was no ordinary bird—as Poliziano realized when he gave Giovanni Pico his extraordinary totem: an absolutely singular Phoenix outdid many woodpeckers, however, no ­matter how loud and colorful. But Poliziano knew someone ­else from the same ­family—­Giovanni’s nephew, Gianfrancesco, who wrote the first biography of his ­uncle and made a show of ignoring “ancestral deeds and pedigree.” What pedigree? A line that started with Picus? No: when Gianfrancesco produced his Life of Giovanni Pico, his Christian piety was narrow and puritanical, not in keeping with Poliziano’s expansive erudition. Something he said about his u ­ ncle was truer of himself: that he liked no “Attic eve­nings,” no “story­book saturnalia,” meaning recherché notes and queries compiled by long-­gone heathens—­“anything easy and relaxing,” wrote one bookish pagan, “aimless and in no special order.” When Gianfrancesco skipped his ­uncle’s genealogy, he feared such amusements as traps of Satan. The stories of the Pico f­ amily that he mentioned and then bypassed, however, w ­ ere neither pagan nor as old as Pêkos and Zeus. They went back a long way, just the same, to the founding of Christendom and the “Emperor Constantine through a great-­grandson, Picus, from whom the w ­ hole ­family took its storied name.”7 Unlike Gianfrancesco Pico, Ingramo Bratti trea­sured the legends of chivalry. He was a cleric who gave ­legal advice to the Pio ­family of Carpi, close cousins of the Picos: the Pio c­ astle was just fifteen miles from Mirandola. Late in the f­ ourteenth ­century, Bratti memorialized both clans in an Italian chronicle—­based on a L atin source, he claimed—­“ in praise of Manfredo’s heirs, especially the Pio ­family and the Picos of Mirandola, as well as other nobles.” He started the story in 320 CE with Constantine the ­Great, the first Christian emperor, who had three sons. The youn­gest was Costanzo, and Italy was his prize when Constantine divided his empire. Costanzo’s d ­ aughter was Euride, though astonishing feats of motherhood would earn her another name—­Miranda. And Costanzo’s dearest friend was his chamberlain, Manfredo, who betrayed their friendship by ­running off with Euride and ignoring her ­father’s wishes. Carrying her jewels, the pair fled to Italy and got t­ here before Costanzo, ending up in a “wooded valley near Modena and Reggio.” Then Manfredo went adventuring and left Euride b ­ ehind, disguised as a peasant and attended by kindly shepherds in their newfound valley. Th ­ ere, as she and Manfredo acquired more lands, triplets arrived—­a ll boys: Pico, Pio, and Papazono. Years



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passed and seven other c­ hildren followed: Pandello, Manfredo, Pedocha, Infante, Siculo, Costanza, and Euride—­ten births in all, two girls and eight boys.8 Costantino Magno |

Costantino, Costante, Costanzo |

Euride + Manfredo |

Pico, Pio, Papazono and seven ­others |

Figlioli di Manfredo

Meanwhile, Costanzo reached Italy and besieged Aquileia, a naval base at the top of the Adriatic. When the emperor’s army failed to take the city, Manfredo brought reinforcements and saved the day. The grateful Costanzo forgave his old friend’s off enses, knighted him, gave him lands, and bestowed a coat of arms. In memory of his bravery at Aquileia, Manfredo’s shield was to display a “black ea­gle (aquila) on a bright green field.” Costanzo also permitted Manfredo to build c­ astles and towers between the Po and the Secchia, a tributary flowing northeast from the Apennines into the g­ reat river. T ­ oday the smaller stream runs through the Commune of Concordia, northwest of Mirandola—­names then unknown to the shepherds in Euride’s valley.9 Delighted by Manfredo’s courage, Costanzo was also amazed by his ­daughter’s ten c­ hildren—so many born to a ­mother so young. The emperor therefore decreed that “Euride would be called Miranda, from whom Mirandola got its name”—an origin story with imperial authentication. Then, while his friend returned to Aquileia, Manfredo marched back in triumph to the Secchia, to rule as patriarch through forty sons and grand­ sons. His heirs ­were also the emperor’s vassals—­but only the emperor’s—­ and they w ­ ere ancestors of the “noble lords Pico, Pio, Papazono, Padella, Pedoca, Manfredo, and Fante,” among o ­ thers: “­People of the region called them the Valiant (Bellici) for their famous deeds, and in ­those days their territory was named the Demesne of Quarantola a­ fter Manfredo’s forty (quaranta) sons. The ­house and lineage of Manfredo’s heirs grew larger and was raised up with many titles (dignità) in cities, c­ astles, and territories of vari­ous parts of Italy.”10

14

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But the next de­cades brought gloom to the peninsula, as the fortunes of Manfredo’s progeny went both down and up. Then, in the twelfth c­ entury, the devout Countess Matilda visited their lands to support the Catholic faith, paying for new churches in Quarantola and environs. An Enrico de Pico, a Bernardino de Pio, and o ­ thers in Manfredo’s line w ­ ere favorites of the countess. Some of them swore before the Commune of Modena to live in that city, build ­houses, and defend the residents—­except against the emperor. And some of Manfredo’s descendants needed protection from their own relatives. Pico and Pio nobles broke with their cousins, fracturing the ­family’s knightly bonds.11 Francesco (fl. 1400?) |

Giovanni (fl. 1432), Francesco |

Gianfrancesco I (d. 1467) + Giulia Boiardo |

Galeotto I (d. 1499), Antonio Maria, GIOVANNI |

Gianfrancesco II (d. 1533)

Time passed, and Ingramo Bratti put his chronicle down, late in the ­fourteenth ­century. More time passed before another ­lawyer from Carpi, also a Pio retainer, picked the narrative up again. This was Battista Papazzoni, who died in 1561, having added his last chapters to the story for the year 1536—­just ­after Gianfrancesco Pico, a n ephew of the Phoenix, was murdered by his own nephew, who then took over as Lord of Concordia and Mirandola. Papazzoni documented the origin of t­ hese titles without dating them: it was 1432, in fact, when the “most noble knights, Giovanni and Francesco, the two only sons of the valiant knight Francesco Pico, first became Lords of Mirandola and Counts of Concordia, given that rank (dignità) by the Most Serene Sigismund and by Frederick, King of the Romans.”12 Never, in the rec­ords kept by Papazzoni, was the Pico patrimony settled—­even ­after the ­brother of one Giovanni turned over to him all the ­family lands, which he then bequeathed to his eldest son, a Gianfrancesco, in 1460. This Gianfrancesco died in 1467, having married Giulia, Feltrino Boiardo’s d ­ aughter: Feltrino was the Count of Scandiano, to the west of Modena. Ignoring Giulia’s two ­daughters, the chronicler listed the next



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generation of Picos as “Galeotto, firstborn, second Antonio Maria, and third Giovanni, vessel of all knowledge and truly a divine intellect.” Promising to tell this child’s tale “in a more appropriate place,” he then showed how higher authorities tried—­and failed—to make peace between Giovanni’s two big b ­ rothers. Antonio Maria, the younger of the warring pair, imported mercenaries from Calabria in 1483, and the emperor himself had to intervene.13 The Phoenix, twenty at the time, had lost his ­father at the age of four in 1467. The last quarter of the Pico / Pio Chronicle starts in that year and ends in 1536—­a rec­ord of petty dynasties committing postfeudal mayhem to guard their lands, titles, revenues, and “privileges, honorable and worthy (honorevoli et degni).” In the ­middle of this awful saga—­while keeping track of Galeottos, Gianfrancescos, and Giovannis—­Papazzoni also kept his promise to get back to the ­family’s “vessel of all knowledge.” This Pico was universally renowned—in all fields of learning and everywhere in Italy. To pursue his studies more eff ectively, he sold his patrimony in order to gain more knowledge and see almost all the universities of Italy. He studied so much that he soon became quite expert in a number of languages. He not only learned the seven liberal arts but also—­with his quick mind and tenacious memory, fed by continuous and tireless study—­became a ­great phi­los­o­pher and fi­nally a most distinguished theologian. And so, with his superb education, this Count Giovanni never hesitated, even when young, to take on any expert of his choosing in debate—­something so amazing and stunning that all the signory of Italy thought him more godlike than ­human, which was all the more astonishing ­because he was in his thirty-­t hird year when it pleased the Lord Almighty to call him, leaving us so many truly divine works that he wrote when so young, as follows: Apology, Letters, On Being and the One, Heptaplus, 12 Books against Divinatory Astrology, an Interpretation of the Old Testament, a Concord of Plato and Aristotle, On Prayer, On ­Human Hierarchy, On the Perfect Life. He wrote books against the wicked, against the Jews, and on many other subjects to defend the Christian religion. His nephew, Lord Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, wrote up his life and saintly death, which was in the year 1490 in the city of Florence. He was buried ­t here in the Church of San Marco, where the Preaching Friars live, to whom he willed his magnificent and very beautiful library.”14

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Since Pico did not sell his birthright to buy an education, did not die in 1490, and did not ­will his library to San Marco, Papazzoni was not in control of the facts. Second­hand accounts ­were available to him, however. Before he died in 1561, Gianfrancesco’s Life had been printed several times in collections that also included works mentioned by the chronicler. But only the first five titles on Papazzoni’s list ­were certainly printed as books or large sections of books, and some ­were no more than proj­ects. Pico never finished a study of concord or of the ­whole Hebrew Bible. On Prayer (De oratione) was a comment on the Pater Noster—­not the celebrated Oration. Was De humana hierarchia or De perfecta vita Papazzoni’s label for the speech? Maybe so: but he found no dignità to brag about in Pico’s writings.15 If the chronicler simply glanced at Gianfrancesco’s Life while paging through a c ollection of Pico’s works, he might never have seen the 900 Conclusions: before 1536, the last date that he entered in the chronicle, this troublesome text was seldom printed and never published with all the other writings. Even if Papazzoni read ­every page of Gianfrancesco’s biography, he could easily have missed the Oration as well: the Life barely registers the existence of the speech and says nothing about its content.16 Despite his errors and omissions, this chronicler who served the chivalry of Carpi and Mirandola assigned the Phoenix correctly to a s mall branch of his ­family’s tree. For all his brilliance and renown, this youn­gest of three Pico ­brothers was Manfredo’s least impor­tant heir in his own generation—­from Papazzoni’s perspective. Consequential deeds and misdeeds w ­ ere the work of Galeotto, the oldest ­brother, and Antonio Maria, the combative ­middle sibling. L ­ ater, when Galeotto died in 1499 and the dazzling Giovanni’s light had been dark for five years, events put another studious Pico, Gianfrancesco, on the front lines of ­family slaughter. The few sentences in the Chronicle about his ­uncle Giovanni ­were a de tour from the bloody traffic. A lesser aristocracy breeding, battling, and savoring its nobility got almost all of Papazzoni’s attention.17 Nonetheless, his annals reported Giovanni Pico’s life of learning. The chronicler wrote that the prince was a son of the Giulia Boiardo who married a G ianfrancesco Pico: correct, and that child was born on February  24, 1463. He died too soon in Florence: correct, but in his thirty-­ second year—­not the thirty-­t hird—on November 17, 1494, eight months ­a fter his thirty-­first birthday. He was a quick study, well-­educated, and a champion debater: all correct. And he wrote some fascinating books: cor-



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rect again. The Apology and Heptaplus, two of the three works that Pico sent to a printer in his lifetime, made Papazzoni’s list—­but not the 900 Conclusions. That Papazzoni omitted the Conclusions by oversight is plausible—­ probable, in fact. But if this custodian of honor even skimmed Gianfrancesco’s biography, he could not have missed a calamity of dishonor that he failed to mention. ­After Pico publicized his ­theses at the end of 1486, it took the pope only a few weeks to forbid the count’s planned pre­sen­ta­tion of them in the Holy City. The audacious young phi­los­o­pher was disgraced and in danger: some of the Conclusions ­were quickly condemned, and l­ater the w ­ hole book was banned.18 ­These dense and difficult pages have never been fully explained—­not in print, anyhow; no modern edition has done the book justice. All the worse in Papazzoni’s time, when almost no one could have read Pico’s polyglot propositions, from start to finish, with understanding—­surely not a local ­lawyer writing a vernacular chronicle. In any event, the Conclusions may simply have been too rare a b ook to notice. As for the visibility of the Oration—­during the period while the chronicler was writing and at the end of the previous c­ entury—­the evidence is scanty. Gianfrancesco rushed past the speech in his Life with just a few words. Elsewhere he gave it only a few sentences, saying that it made him uncomfortable even though o ­ thers disagreed: “Scholars often admire it as the pinnacle of learning and eloquence,” he acknowledged.19 Who ­were ­these experts that Gianfrancesco did not identify? Prob­ably friends of his ­uncle from Florence or Ferrara—­including Poliziano, perhaps. Other­wise, among the grander possibilities, what about Lorenzo de’ Medici, Marsilio Ficino, and Girolamo Savonarola? The Oration should not have pleased Savonarola: too much magic and arcane Judaism. And it would have reminded Ficino of the orator’s shaming: ­after all, the Oration’s purpose was to introduce the infamous Conclusions. Lorenzo and Poliziano w ­ ere both gone when Gianfrancesco made his few remarks about the speech, and—­since it embarrassed him—­maybe his rule was ex mortuis nil nisi tutum: attribute only uncontroversial views to the dead. What­ever his reasons ­were, Pico’s nephew did not bother to name anyone who liked his ­uncle’s speech. Then the centuries rolled by ­until ­later admirers of the Oration—­hundreds of them—­wrote the books and articles that have loaded the world’s libraries with praises of the orator, agreeing with Poliziano, explic­itly or tacitly, that he was a Phoenix.20

18

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More than 500 years—­the bird’s expected life span—­have gone by since the won­der boy of Mirandola was given his unique alias. Poliziano, his backer, died a f ew weeks before him in 1494, and in 1489 his admiring words had been a pledge of expectations. Suppose, by some grace granted to poets and critics, he had seen Pico’s ­whole dossier in a vision, complete even before the Phoenix burned himself out: Would the critic have been disappointed?

2. ​Missing Persons When Giovanni Pico died in Florence on a November day in 1494, French troops ­were marching through the city and the world was about to end—­ according to a l ate bulletin from a h istory of the world published in Nuremberg the year before. ­These Books of Chronicles, paying no mind to Pico, recorded his era as closing a s ixth age of secular time, before the Apocalypse that would bring history to a stop in the seventh. ­After the makers of the Chronicles registered its date of publication—­July 12, 1493—­ they left a few more pages “with nothing written for the rest of the sixth age.” The recent past had been full of portents and disasters—­comets, earthquakes, eclipses, plagues, storms, and swarms of locusts: some expected worse to follow. One of the last events listed, on October  22, 1492, was a burning of Jews in Sternberg on charges of defiling the Eucharist. Calamities ­were signs of the end: for the authors of the Chronicles, however, the calamity in Sternberg was not the slaughter; it was desecrating the sacrament.21 The image illustrating the story from Sternberg shows twenty or more Jews crammed into a flaming pit and a guard feeding the fire. The scene is one of more than 1,800 woodcuts in the Chronicles. Most of them—­not repulsive like the Sternberg image—­show ­either lordly personages or ­grand cities built by them. Many are rulers of state or church, and some are sages or scholars. A very few are horrors like the Antichrist, descending to open the seventh age as skele­tons dance from their graves. Once such pictures could be put into printed books, celebrity multiplied as never before. Not just names and deeds but also f­ aces—­icons of fame—­ were produced quickly and preserved on the page to travel in large numbers over long distances to many readers, each copy with the same text and the same images. This revolution in technology inspired the burghers of Nuremberg to help Hartman Schedel, a learned physician, make the first



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illustrated book on so g­ rand a s cale, their Chronicles, which names the mighty, recounts their deeds, and shows pictures of them—­doing the same for some of the learned.22 Pictures of Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Perotti, Lorenzo Valla, and other eminent Italians illustrate the last years of the sixth age. Readers of the ­ ere also Chronicles, frightened by terror from the skies and open tombs, w to be edified by pictures of writers holding their books, by scholars sharing pictorial space with dev­ils and the dead. Starting with Petrarch and ending with Marsilio Ficino, the Chronicles tells about princes, popes, and their learned servants—­historians, theologians, speech writers, grammarians, poets, and so on—­from the period now called ‘the Re­nais­sance.’ The big book does not use that word or call t­ hese ­people ‘humanists’—­their label ­today in narratives of modern culture that start with ‘Re­nais­sance humanism’ and treat Pico as one of its celebrities. The end-­times in Nuremberg ­were a vestibule of apocalypse, not a doorway to modernity.23 The Chronicles never mentions Pico. Born in the age of print and ­dying in it—­one of the first celebrities to do so—he never shows his face in this monument of innovation, which says not a word about him. Since the book describes an event from late 1492—­the Sternberg massacre—­and since Ficino, Pico’s friend, gets a pa ragraph, chronology ­will not explain the silence. The makers of the Chronicles ­either knew nothing about Pico in the early 1490s or thought him not worth a paragraph or a picture. ­Either way, the prince’s name and deeds w ­ ere inconspicuous for authors of a book that often looked south to Italy. Even t­ here, not every­one was dazzled: in Savonarola’s jaundiced words—­reported by Pico’s nephew just a­ fter his ­uncle died—he had not yet attained the “reputation and celebrity that would have come to him in full had he lived.”24 Where the Chronicles ignores Pico, tracks the sixth age, and lists its luminaries, several dozen other Italians are praised for erudition and eloquence—­a few of them for practical exploits as well. Many are pictured and all are described, as in the entry on Ficino. No likeness is shown, however, for this “man of surpassing intelligence, supremely learned in both languages, very well informed about many subjects and indisputably the leader among experts on Plato.” Similar terms—­“the special pride, glory, and crown of Platonic philosophy”—­apply to him in another work of reference, a bio-­bibliography with thousands of entries On Writers about Religion published a year a­ fter the Chronicles by Abbot Johann Trithemius of Sponheim in the Rhineland.

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This large bibliography has no pictures, its order is chronological, and Ficino’s entry comes ­under the year 1494—­a long with writers possibly, but not certainly, still living: “I believe him to be yet with us,” wrote the abbot. He described some other authors—­including Italians—in the same indeterminate way, saving the last place in his book for himself, just ­after Schedel and the Chronicles. Although only a year had passed since the Nuremberg volume went to press, ­there was enough time for Trithemius not only to learn about this “extraordinary” proj­ect but also to include someone missing from it—­Pico. He described the prince as still living but said ­little about his life while listing four works by him, three in print: the 900 Conclusions, the Apology, and the Heptaplus. He also mentioned an unpublished Psalms commentary but said nothing about another work yet to be printed—­the Oration.25 By 1494 Ficino’s books—­“many” and “brilliant” according to Trithemius—­ drew praise not only from this energetic bibliographer but also from Schedel’s e­ arlier history of the world. Pico’s writings failed to register in Nuremberg, however. To tell his universal story, Schedel relied on an e­ arlier chronicle by an Italian monk from Bergamo, Giacomo Filippo Foresti. The first version of Foresti’s annals—­the one used by Schedel—­came out in 1483, when Pico was twenty years old and still a student. Two de­cades ­later, when Foresti published a revision, the prince was dead and newsworthy: ­ ecause of his astonishing knowledge of ­every science, he put his brilB liance on show through nearly all Italy as the man most superbly distinguished in our time not just for good fortune but for the w ­ hole of his ­mental and bodily endowment. . . . ​This remarkable Giovanni . . . ​was never timid about meeting any expert on any subject. . . . ​­Because of his admirable way of debating, in fact, all the potentates of Italy thought him no less worth cultivating than admiring. . . . ​His nephew, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, wrote about his life and his blessed passing in quite splendid style. He died very young in Florence, in the year 1490 from the birth of Christ, and lies buried in the Dominican Church of San Marco, to which he willed his enormous library.

Foresti’s updated book gave readers less to look at than the older Chronicles from Nuremberg. ­After a few scenes of the creation, the only other images are vignettes of cities. Other­wise, even though the text is often the same, only the Nuremberg volume frames its tales with hundreds of pictures of



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men and fewer w ­ omen. But Foresti’s few sentences about Pico, along with the skimpier summary by Trithemius, mark a beginning in the story of the prince’s printed stories. Th ­ ese two short notices came early in a long line of statements about him in histories, monographs, polemics, speeches, antiquarian studies, works of reference, and other books. Before the nineteenth ­century, few of them discussed the work for which the prince is now best remembered, his Oration.26 Since Foresti put his words about Pico ­under the year 1490, his ­mistake about the year of the prince’s death (1494) was material, not typographical. (Papazzoni’s ­later account, not printed u ­ ntil the nineteenth c­ entury, made similar errors.) And since Foresti mentioned Gianfrancesco Pico’s Life of his u ­ ncle, he cannot have finished his revision before 1496, when the Life and most of the elder Pico’s works first became available in a c ollection edited by his nephew. Did Foresti read every­thing that Gianfrancesco published? Prob­ably not. Why ask so much of a compiler? His summary of Pico’s c­ areer, garbling Gianfrancesco’s account, shows no real understanding of the prince’s writings. He never mentions the Commento, which Gianfrancesco did not publish, nor the two epistolary essays on poetry and philosophical language included in the 1496 collection. Foresti lets Pico’s Conclusions fade into “many questions . . . ​disputed in the Pa­ri­sian style,” and the Oration that introduces them simply vanishes—­even though Gianfrancesco had it printed for the first time. Of the major works, only the Heptaplus stands out. Yet no one would guess that its “exposition of the six days” is Christianized Kabbalah. Foresti praises Pico for refuting “malicious charges by Jews” and for battling “Jews and faithless phi­los­o­phers,” using snippets of Gianfrancesco’s Life to pre­ sent the prince as the Church’s champion against them.27 Foresti’s revised annals show that Pico’s fame grew ­after his death in 1494 and the publication of his biography in 1496. Observers far from Mirandola noticed the prince e­ arlier, however—­even before he died, on the evidence left by Trithemius ­after Schedel ignored Pico in 1493. He was not the only Italian celebrity to be left out of the Chronicles. Other Quattrocento notables now called ‘humanists’—in the limelight for us, but off stage in the Nuremberg volume—­could fill several alphabets of absent worthies: Leon Battista Alberti, Ermolao Barbaro, Cyriac of Ancona, Angelo Decembrio, and so on. Another missing intellectual—­besides Pico—­was Giannozzo Manetti.

22

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Considering the length of the list in the Chronicles—­just forty-­three Italians named and described—no single absence stands out. Choices reflected the interests and talents of the volume’s principal author, Schedel, a native of Nuremberg who studied in Padua and acquired some Greek. This erudite healer and friend of German literati was proud of his Italian experience and classical education. But his information was ­limited—­like space in his huge book. No room for Alberti: surprising, surely, from our point of view. But how many ­will now miss Barbaro or Decembrio or ­others left out by Schedel?28 Manetti, familiar to modern experts, got no attention from Schedel. Nor did Pico or his Oration. ­Today, for students of the Re­nais­sance, Pico’s presence in the bibliography by Trithemius ­will look normal, but his absence from the Chronicles ­will seem odd—­especially for t­ hose who have read his speech in En­glish as an Oration on the Dignity of Man.29 This Oration has entranced teachers and their students in North Amer­ i­ca since ­after World War II. As colleges expanded, professors needed textbooks for new courses on ‘Western Civilization.’ One was published in 1948, a pivotal year for Pico’s fortunes: ἀ e Re­nais­sance Philosophy of Man, still in print, includes an En­glish version of the speech—­never translated in full before the twentieth c­ entury. ἀ e Western Heritage, a ­later textbook typical of its time, reprints a few lines. In them Pico imagines God clarifying the terms of creation for Adam: “To him it is granted to have what­ever he chooses, to be what­ever he ­wills.” A boxed headline—­a princely salute framed by a Pico Box—­introduces the passage: Pico della Mirandola States the Re­nais­sance Image of Man One of the most eloquent descriptions of the Re­nais­sance image of man comes from the Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola (1463– 1494). In his famed Oration on the Dignity of Man (c. 1486) Pico describes man as ­free to become what­ever he chooses.

In the next edition of ἀ e Western Heritage, Pico’s topic becomes “the Re­nais­sance image of mankind,” and what he describes is “­humans as ­free to become what­ever they choose.” In a ­later edition, “mankind” has evolved again into “­human beings,” and the reconfigured praise of humanity has provoked interrogation. “How ­great, ­really, is the choice outlined ­here,” we are asked. “Is the concept of freedom in this passage a modern one?”30



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A similar book—­Western Civilization: A Br ief History—­presented the same part of the Oration in the same way in 1999, with Pico proclaiming “the unlimited potentiality of h ­ uman beings.” By the end of the twentieth ­century, the speech had become a meme. Pico was a fixture in dozens of textbooks meant to explain world history or Western civilization or the Re­nais­sance to college students. Praises abounded in a flamboyant vocabulary: “bold,” “brilliant,” “dazzling,” “exuberant,” “gargantuan,” “outstanding,” “remarkable,” “renowned,” “striking.” The Oration had become “immortal,” the “most famous Re­nais­sance statement on the nature of man” and the “supreme statement of the Re­nais­sance idolization of man.”31 Without this speech by a valiant prince, our usual tale about the Re­nais­ sance could not be told. But the proto-­story in the Chronicles—­recorded in Pico’s era—­did without him and Manetti too. Our story is not Hartman Schedel’s, however, nor is it the story illustrated by the pictures in his ­giant volume. The Chronicles uses many images more than once: the number of woodcuts shown is about three times the number of woodblocks made for the book. The ensemble is unforgettable, though most of the pictures are crude, seen one by one. Some, like the depiction of the Sternberg massacre (the image repeats for another massacre of Jews), are all too memorable. The grotesque pictures that close the book—­leaping bones and the Antichrist—­show signs of genius, however (Figure  1). Dürer’s teacher, Michael Wolgemut, was involved, and the young Dürer may have helped.32 Had Pico seen the decayed bodies dancing in the Chronicles, the death, filth, and degradation would have moved him—­perhaps to disgust, surely to repentance. In 1486 he had written the speech now widely (though wrongly) seen as the leading statement of its day about ­human dignity. A clear message of his Oration, however, is dislike of the ­human body, whose senses hang like a “noose round the soul’s neck.”33 Around 1450 Manetti had written a l onger work, also in Latin, that praised dignitas while treating the body diff erently—­“a dwelling for the ­human soul” and “amazingly delicate.” He saw proof of mankind’s superiority in the ­human frame ­because it was “worthier” (dignior) than any other animal’s. Accordingly, he opposed t­ hose who had written “in praise of death” to prove the “misery of h ­ uman life.” Unlike his opponents, he enjoyed the world that he lived in, prizing the skill and spirit on display in the magnificent art of his hometown—­Florence. He found the “energy” on view ­there “outstanding and amazing.” Manetti’s response to images of

24

dig n i t y

Figure 1. ​“Dance of Death,” Nuremberg Chronicles, 1493.

­ uman beauty in art—­“ how bodies look on the outside”—is striking, nothh ing like Pico’s loathing of the body.34

3. ​Kant’s Dignity and Pico’s Dignitas In his third Critique, speaking about fine art, Immanuel Kant reached a remarkable conclusion about its products, which are often inert and lifeless: a w ork of art “must in itself always show some dignity (Würde).” Written some years ­earlier, however, Kant’s Groundwork seems to rule out that possibility by restricting dignity to ­humans and the moral law. In Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, where ­humans act rationally—as when they evaluate works of art—­“every­t hing has ­either a price (Preis) or a dignity.” ­Things with prices have equivalents that can replace them, whereas dignity belongs to what is beyond price and has no equivalent. The absolutely incomparable and utterly irreplaceable ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, perhaps?35



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Price and dignity are types of value (Wert). Prices, w ­ hether calculated by needs in a market or driven by whims in a carnival of delight, are relative values. Dignity is an absolute and intrinsic value, possessed only by “morality and by humanity insofar as it is morally capable”—­morality enforced by a system of laws, which h ­ umans legislate. Outside the Kingdom of Ends, both nature and art are productive, making ­things whose values are relative. Within this moral realm, however, the salient item is no ­thing at all but “a mentality recognized as dignity, . . . ​an unconditional, incomparable value.”36 How to bring this item into focus? One way is by assessing the re­spect that each rational being owes to ­every other, according to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: “not merely as a means to ends, . . . ​but as an end in itself, . . . ​ he possesses a dignity (an absolute inner value).” Hence, “a h ­ uman being regarded as a p erson . . . ​is raised above any price . . . ​and possesses an inalienable dignity (dignitas interna).” It is this inner dignity that commands from other persons the re­spect that no one may forfeit—­re­spect not just for “a person generally but as a h ­ uman.” Such a person has “duties that his own reason lays upon him” by the self-­legislating that constitutes both ­human personhood and dignity, so that the one always comes with the other, inseparably.37 If so—if dignity is inalienable—­why does Kant warn against forfeiting re­spect? Why is self-­esteem a duty, since duties can go undone? Why worry about the servility that disavows dignity or the ambition that seeks “an even greater inner value”? Perhaps re­spect, servility, and ambition are all relational—­relating persons to ­things or each other by attitude or desire—­ and perhaps self-­esteem is reflexive, turning the relation of re­spect back on the self, whereas dignity is not reflexive or relational, but constitutive (in part) of the h ­ uman person. Perhaps “greater inner value” is misleading ­because any mea­sure of increase must have a standard, relating the unrelatable. The questions are hard, and Kant did not answer them all.38 Kant said that the moral law itself has dignity, as do the ­humans who legislate universal law. And the ­actual laws on the books are put ­there by ­humans. Laws, rules, maxims, and other such enactments by ­humans get their dignity from the enactors. Dignity belongs to persons, not to ­things, natu­ral or artificial, whose values are relative, not entirely their own. Impersonal ­things lack the absolute, unconditional, incomparable value that belongs—­and belongs inalienably—to each h ­ uman person. But a work of art needs to show some dignity. So what might Kant have meant?

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A work of artifice or art is an artificial ­thing—­not a person. In some sense, practical or poetic, Michelangelo’s ceiling may be incomparably valuable, but the value cannot be absolute. Tastes may change and horrify us all. The Vatican might sell the chapel and its ceiling. The commerce, as such, would not trade on anyone’s dignity: up on the ceiling, Adam, God, and the rest of that lofty crowd are not persons—­just pictures of persons. Pictures can be bought and sold. Perhaps the subtle economy of value, price, and dignity can bear some strain, however: if a work of art—­Adam naked on high—­“must in itself always show some dignity,” maybe Kant equivocated a bit about ‘dignity’ or was more intent on the showing (zei­ ecause it looks gen) of it. The lifeless image only seems to have that feature b alive on the ceiling. The painted Adam can “show some dignity” b ­ ecause it is a likeness of a ­human person.39 Kant himself connected Würde, his word for ‘dignity,’ with dignitas in Latin. Wilhelm Tennemann did the same when he adapted Jacob Brucker’s e­ arlier history of philosophy to Kant’s new ideas and terminology, in order to explicate the much older speech called Oratio de hominis dignitate—­t hough not called that by its author, Pico. Written in 1486, the Oration was not yet as famous as Pico when Tennemann noticed it more than three centuries ­later. He and other historians of philosophy put the speech on its path to fame, but only at the end of the Enlightenment.40 Pico had planned the Oration to introduce an overblown event that never happened, severely damaging his reputation. Meant to impress the College of Cardinals, the speech was to introduce a much longer text—900 philosophical ­t heses—­t hat the prince wanted to debate in Rome. Pope Innocent VIII condemned a few of the t­ heses, forcing their author to run away to France. Had he not been so well connected, the calamity might have been fatal. He survived but never published the Oration and seems to have been embarrassed by it. In any case, ­because the speech relied on coded Jewish secrets, the intended audience of Christian dignitaries could never have grasped its main message—­t hat ­humans must escape the body and turn themselves into angels, using magic and Kabbalah.41 ­After Tennemann wrote about Pico, many p ­ eople who read the Oration did not read far enough. The orator’s exordium, a s hort blast of studied rhe­toric, rewrites the biblical script for God, permitting Adam “to have what he chooses, to be what he wants.” Since Adam has not yet sinned, God speaks to his creature before the Fall—­with all the prelapsarian advan-



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tages of body and soul. Despite the benefits of this situation for the first ­human, what the heirs of his sin ­ought to choose is nothing ­human at all—­a lesson that comes ­after the opening of the speech.42 Pico’s eventual advice is nothing like the usual accounts of the Oration; an extended se­lection shows the diff erence: Let us climb for the heights, panting; and let us strive with all our might to reach them—­since we can do it if we ­w ill it. Let us scorn ­t hings of earth, let us despise t­ hose of heaven, and then, leaving b ­ ehind what­ever belongs to the world, let us fly up to the hypercosmic court nearest the most exalted divinity, where . . . ​Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones hold the first places. Since we cannot abide second place and cannot yield, let us be their rivals for rank (dignitas) and glory. . . . ​We are to form our lives on the model of the Cherubic life. . . . ​­Because we mind the flesh and smell like dirt, however, we may not attain this on our own, so let us go to the ancient F ­ athers. . . . ​Emulating the Cherubic life on earth, . . . ​let us consult the patriarch Jacob. . . . ​He w ­ ill use a figure, . . . ​t hat a ladder reaches from the ground below to the summit of heaven, . . . ​w ith the Lord seated at the top, while up and down the ladder angels of contemplation take turns moving back and forth. Yet if we are to aspire to the angelic life, . . . ​who ­w ill touch the Lord’s ladder with dirty feet or hands unclean? For the impure to touch the pure is sacrilege, as the mysteries teach. . . . ​­These hands, ­t hese feet—­t he ­whole sensual part where, so they say, the lure of the body hangs like a noose round the soul’s neck—­let us wash them . . . ​, lest we be turned away from the ladder, desecrated and defiled. . . . ​Then, animated by a Cherubic spirit, . . . ​resting in the bosom of the F ­ ather, who is above the ladder, we s­ hall be consumed in theological bliss. . . . ​We ­w ill take delight from the peace that we have longed for—­t he holiest peace, the unbroken bond, the friendship of the single-­souled wherein all our spirits do not so much converge in the one Mind above ­every mind as in some unsayable way emerge as absolutely one. This is the friendship that the Pythagoreans say is the end of all philosophy. This is the peace that God makes on high, which angels descending to earth have announced to men of good w ­ ill so that through this peace t­ hese same men, ascending to heaven, might be made into angels. . . . ​A nd transported beyond ourselves like burning Seraphs, full of divine power, we ­shall be ourselves no longer, but s­ hall be him, the very One who made us.

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Pico wants ­humans to become angels and then to be annihilated in God: the rest of the Oration tells them how. The speech is an exhortation to do this angel magic, using Kabbalist techniques of ecstatic transformation to become “absolutely one” with God, thus consuming the self in “theological bliss” ­u ntil “we ­shall be ourselves no longer.” Fragments of scripture punctuating the speech ­were clues for the few who could see them for what they ­were—­a llusions to texts of Kabbalah that no Christians of Pico’s day could possibly have recognized. Writing so learnedly at the age of twenty-­t hree about material so arcane, the young prince was full of himself—­blind to the arrogance that kept readers of the Oration baffled for five centuries, ­u ntil just a f ew de­cades ago. Certainly Tennemann was in no position to understand what Pico was talking about.43 What the speech says about dignitas is easy to see, however, ­because the word comes up only twice. When Pico first used it—in the passage just cited—he paired dignitas with gloria as a prize held by angels, not ­humans. It denotes angelic rank, higher than ­human yet comparable, and comparison with angels defeats arguments for ­human superiority (praestantia, not dignitas) ­because angels stand higher in the cosmos and their cognitive faculties are stronger. Dignitas in its second occurrence describes the philosophical preparation that precedes the esoteric part of Pico’s curriculum. The pairing ­t here of dignitas with emolumenta (‘advantages’) also makes this second instance of the word, denoting the value of philosophy, a comparative and relative term. In neither case does digni­ uman persons, except aspirationally, and neither use justitas belong to h fies ‘dignity’ as a translation, with all the Kantian baggage of the modern En­g lish word. As for the speech as a ­whole, Pico never both­ered to give it a title. Oration on t he Dignity of Man has become standard, however, ­a fter an early editor jumped to conclusions from a glance at the first few pages.44 This false title was the one known to Tennemann, who misread the speech as indicated by the title—at least the first few pages that ­were the most readable. Turning the Oration’s ideas into German, he had many more options than Würde, however. Perhaps he remembered where Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals linked Würde with dignitas—or perhaps not. One dictionary available since 1779, Immanuel Scheller’s Complete Latin-­ German Lexicon, gave him t­ hese choices in addition to Würde:



Vile Bodies and Naked Dignity

Ansehen Anstand Ehrbarkeit Ehre Ehrenstelle Schicklichkeit Schönheit Stand Tugend Verdienst Werth Wohlstand Würdigkeit

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reputation decency integrity prestige post of honor propriety beauty rank virtue merit value prosperity worthiness

The German words overlap, and each has its own wider range, reflecting the breadth and complexity in classical Latin of dignitas, whose meaning varied with context and over time. A ­later work of 1845, Wilhelm Freund’s Dictionary of the Latin Language, is tidier than Scheller’s Lexicon, classifying senses of dignitas in three groups: “original,” “by metonymy of cause for eff ect,” and “figurative.” The basic meanings are rare, says Freund, perhaps found only in Cicero: “worth (Würdigsein), worthiness (Würdigkeit), and merit.” Metonymies are frequent: “the dignity (Würde), reputation, re­spect, or high standing that arises from the physical or moral features of a person or the state.” The word also applies “figuratively to physical objects for value, dignity (Würde), or distinction.” 45 Tennemann had many options, then. But only two—­Wert and Würde—­ would insert Pico’s dignitas, alongside Preis, into Kant’s moral calculus. For Pico’s fame and the celebrity of his Oration, the choice of Würde was decisive. Yet nothing calls for it in the speech that Pico wrote, which says nothing about a ­human dignitas. Nonetheless, appeals to Pico’s missing account of dignity have become reflexive in con­temporary accounts of the subject. ­There, as in writings of the previous two centuries, the full-­blown notion is sometimes ‘­human freedom and dignity,’ a nexus treated as characteristic of modernity. The modern world itself, by other widespread accounts, was also the invention of Pico’s era, the ‘Re­nais­sance,’ as described with g­ reat power by Jacob Burckhardt and very gracefully by Walter Pater: Pico’s speech and Adam’s body w ­ ere moments of modernity for Pater.46

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“This high dignity of man” is Pater’s phrase—­making too much, like ­ thers, of the Oration’s mistaken title. The word ‘dignity,’ without refero ence to the speech’s elusive content, signaled to him a “counterpoise to the increasing tendency of medieval religion to depreciate man’s nature, . . . ​to make it ashamed of itself. . . . ​It helped man onward to that . . . ​rehabilitation of h ­ uman nature, the body, the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Re­nais­sance fulfills.” Likewise, but on better evidence of the eyes, Michelangelo’s genius was to concern itself almost exclusively with the making of man, . . . ​t he first and unique act, the creation of life itself in its supreme form. . . . ​Fair as the young men of the Elgin marbles, the Adam of the Sistine Chapel is unlike them. . . . ​In that languid figure ­t here is something rude and satyr-­like. . . . ​His ­whole form is gathered into an expression of mere expectancy and reception; he has hardly strength enough to lift his fin­ ger to touch the fin­ger of the creator; yet a touch of the finger-­tips w ­ ill suffice.

And so it did suffice. This huge, dreamy, muscle-­bound Bacchus has, within himself, what it takes to make a heavenly connection and become a god on earth (Figure 2). The Creator floats above Adam, but the creature steals the show. Almighty God, with a crowd stirring ­under his cloak, is more than just scenery, but not much more. Just who has been made in whose likeness? The question is fair, and “rehabilitation” is no longer the issue for Adam’s senses, mind, or body. “The high dignity of man” that Pater saw in the Re­nais­sance simply exhibits itself in them—up t­ here, on display in Adam’s nakedness.47 Since Kant thought that a work of art must show some dignity, could he allow as much about this painted Adam, a picture of the first h ­ uman, while still confining dignity to mankind and the moral law? Perhaps he could find a way, true to his own words about art and dignity. But what about Pico and his angel magic—­those “symbols of the Jewish ritual,” as Pater called them? This was craziness, by Kant’s reckoning: “rapture (Schwärmerei) that deludes itself by hoping to see beyond all limits of sense, a dreaming by princi­ples or raving rationally.” 48 Neither the Oration nor what it introduces had or has any bearing on Kant’s theory of dignity, despite Tennemann’s remarks about Pico’s dignitas as Würde. Moreover, ­because the prince wanted to annihilate himself in God, he assumed what Schopenhauer would ­later describe as a view



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Figure 2. ​ἀ e Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, 1508–1512.

“directly contradicting Kant”—­that the diff erence between one living ­thing and another is “only a transient deceptive appearance” that adds no value at all to humanity. But Kant has had more disciples than Schopenhauer. His theory of Würde led to modern conceptions of dignity whose outstanding official expression is the “Universal Declaration of H ­ uman Rights” made by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948. The “Declaration” recognizes dignity as inherent in “all members of the ­human ­family” and links it with “inalienable rights” as “the foundation of freedom.” If Pico ­were ­really the author of a text that anticipated this conception, he would deserve our attention and admiration as an architect of modernity. But he wrote no such t­ hing.49

4. ​Manetti’s Dignitas 1 Should we skip Pico’s era, the Re­nais­sance, while tracking dignitas through the ages? Not yet, b ­ ecause other texts from the same period—­like Manet­ uman Worth and Excellence—­say more about it.50 ti’s longer work On H Manetti’s book emulates an ­earlier, shorter essay On H ­ uman Excellence and Superiority, dedicated in 1450 by Bartolomeo Facio to Pope Nicholas V. Facio was Genoa’s ambassador to Alfonso V of Aragon, the king of Naples, who supported a l arge clientele of scholars, Facio among them. Also in Alfonso’s retinue was Manetti, who may already have met Facio

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when he represented Florence in Genoa—­and ­later when Florence sent him to Naples in 1443 and to Rome when Nicholas was elected. The new pontiff knew Manetti well; they had studied together in Florence. And the Florentine had already seen Facio’s book in Naples. He described it to Alfonso, in his lavish way, as “excellent, outstanding, worth remembering and deserving much praise besides.” If a pope had so fine a book, a king should have one too: so Manetti wrote another on the same subject. He finished before the end of 1452, a­ fter returning to Tuscany. The book is larger than Facio’s and painfully well or­ga­nized, as if by someone who has just discovered topic sentences. Manetti is also more engaged in the ­here and now, less confined by patristic and scholastic dogma. But he says no more than Facio about the concept or concepts signified by dignitas. This is remarkable b ­ ecause (within the limits of current research) Manetti’s book is the only finished piece of Latin prose from the Quattrocento that claims to be about dignitas—­except for Pico’s mistitled speech.51 A survey of Re­nais­sance texts on dignitas includes Manetti’s book but credits Petrarch with “the first explicit treatment of the theme of the ‘dignity of man.’ ” Petrarch’s subject was actually larger, however—­Remedies for Both Kinds of Fortune, where dignitas comes up briefly in a chapter on “Sadness and Misery,” sandwiched between toothache and the plague. Nearly ninety years passed before Antonio da Barga, an Olivetan monk, tested the same theme in a sketch On Mankind’s Worth and the Excellence of H ­ uman Life, prompting Facio—­a favorite of Antonio’s—­and then Manetti to join the conversation. A f ew years l­ater, Poggio Bracciolini turned the ­tables with Two Books on the Misery of the H ­ uman Condition. ­ uman Misery, while ­Human Happiness Giovanni Garzoni also wrote On H was Benedetto Morandi’s topic. ­After Platina (Bartolommeo de’ S acchi) discussed ἀ e True and False Good in the 1470s, Aurelio Brandolini, his ­ uman Life and the Need student, followed with a Dialogue on the State of H 52 to Bear the Body’s Ills. All in all, illness and misery did as well as health and happiness in this period, and dignitas was on no one’s marquee—­except Antonio da Barga’s and Manetti’s. But making too much of titles in the Quattrocento would be a ­mistake; manuscript publication, unstable in such ­matters, was the norm ­until late in the ­century. Still, in the tale of ‘dignity,’ much has been made of a title that Pico never gave his speech, where dignitas occurs just twice and the h ­ uman type never. Manetti’s book, what­ever its flaws, has at



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least the interest of using the Latin word often—­ten times as often as Pico’s speech.53 Writing about h ­ uman excellence presented many occasions for mentioning dignitas. Perhaps too many: Manetti’s book is egregiously overwritten. E ­ very paragraph comes fully padded. Explicit outlining and signposting are relentless. No rhetorical figure of repetition goes unrepeated: commoratio, hendiatris, synathroesmus, synonymia, and tautology are staples. Pleonasms are everywhere, as in Manetti’s nod to Facio’s shorter eff ort: “excellent, outstanding, worth remembering and deserving much praise besides.” Besides? Duplication, triplication, and beyond are ele­ments of style for Manetti: Strunk and White would have baffled him. But carping at bloated writing in a dead language would have l­ ittle point ­were the wordiness not a remedy—­possibly—­for vagueness on the nature of dignitas.54 When Kant claimed that dignity cannot be taken from any h ­ uman and cannot be priced, he gave reasons for what he thought. From his reasoning, a definition can be derived: According to one expert, Kant’s dignity is “the absolute, hence equal, worth of all rational beings.” But Manetti’s way was not to state definitions or justify their ele­ments; he kept talking about dignitas without ever saying what it is. How can we find out? Pleonasms may ­ fter a help, as in the title of his book: De dignitate et excellentia hominis. A few pages, anyone can see that this pairing of dignitas with excellentia is nothing unusual. It’s a formula, a habit, a tic in Manetti’s Latin.55 In the first lines of the book, in a space of 200 words, I count nine pleonasms, involving 29 words. Other pairings pop up everywhere, like plane et aperte (‘plainly and clearly’), used three dozen times. Dreary repetition shows this coupling to be empty: the second partner never changes anything about the first—no gain, no loss. This is not always so, however. Consider certa ac vera (‘certain and true’). As presented by Manetti, this marriage is also childless, but it might be other­wise: truth and certainty are not the same, ­after all. Or take animus mensque (‘spirit and mind’). As Manetti notes, experts could not decide ­whether an animus was always an anima, sometimes reserving the latter for ‘soul,’ the former for ‘mind.’ Glossing animus with mens might be informative, then. Suppose this ­were so for the dignitate et excellentia in Manetti’s title: he would be informing us about dignitas by pairing it with excellentia. Wordiness about dignitas might help us learn what he thought about it.56

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The point is lexical and philological, and it bears on philosophy. Another side of philology, the study of ancient texts, does the same. Manetti wrote and spoke Latin, but it was not his maternal language. His authorial vocabulary relied on the oldest books known to him, whose recovery from medieval oblivion was momentous for him and his peers. In real­ity, many Latin classics never dropped out of sight during the M ­ iddle Ages: almost every­ thing that survived was copied by medieval scribes. Nonetheless, when Petrarch found books by Cicero and Livy that had long gone unread, the shock of the new was electric, exciting scholars like Manetti to revere the ancient texts, study them closely, and learn them by heart. If Cicero had much to say about dignitas, Manetti would have known.

5. ​Cicero’s Dignitas Cicero said a ­great deal—­over a thousand uses of dignitas, half the total for recorded classical Latin. In his lifetime, as the Republic collapsed, the politics of a crumbling state ­shaped the word. ­Because he used it so often to make po­liti­cal points, and ­because he was a Lord of Latinity for ­people like Manetti, Cicero’s usage—­political and opportunist at its core—­was the center of gravity for Manetti’s dignitas. Cicero did not always use it in the same way, of course—­not opportune for a politician. His speeches show us an expedient dignitas in practice. For theory, we have his essays on oratory as well as the philosophical writings. His many letters shed light on all facets of the word.57 Not an aristocrat nor born in Rome, Cicero had the wit and cunning to win the state’s highest office. He was elected consul in 63 BCE, but Rome’s ferocious politics soon forced him into exile. In 57, a­ fter events turned in his f­ avor, he came back, just in time for Caesar’s alliance with Pompey and Crassus to end his c­ areer in ‘normal’ Republican aff airs. Before that humiliation, just a f ew months ­after returning, he spoke on behalf of an ally, Lucius Publius Sestius, who had been charged with using armed force illegally. Cicero got Sestius off , presenting him as a hero ready to give his life for Rome—­“a state with such resources, an empire of such dignitas.”58 To get the judges on his client’s side, Cicero insisted that they, just like Sestius, w ­ ere ‘good’ (boni) Romans—­the very best (optimi), in fact. The faction that framed Sestius was called ‘popu­lar’ (popularis), though its bosses ­were puppeteers—­not stewards—of the ­people’s interests. Their opponents, including Cicero, w ­ ere ‘nobles’ or optimates. But he insisted that his



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party was not an aristocratic clique. “All are optimates,” he claimed, “who are not criminals or perverts by nature or insane.” Even former slaves—­ though not current slaves or even all freedmen—­could qualify. Cicero threw a wide net but quickly pulled it tight: the best p ­ eople must also be “well off in domestic circumstances.” Only t­ hose with wealth and property could aff ord the civic engagement that he took for granted. The very best of the best ran the Senate that ruled the Republic, or so Cicero hoped. What did the optimates want? “Peace with dignity”—in one standard translation—or “ease conjoined with duty” or “easy dignity.” The Latin is cum dignitate otium, and it has puzzled the experts, who have worried mainly about otium. If dignitas is ‘easy,’ for example, otium slides into sprezzatura—­too nonchalant for earnest Romans. ‘Leisure’ might be attractive to sincere citizens, but could they aff ord it? Or maybe idleness was de­cadent. Seemlier would be ‘tranquility,’ suggesting ataraxia, a moral ideal of Greek sages admired by Cicero. ­Under any description of otium, dignitas was the desired complement, but not just any otium would do, nor just any dignitas: “It befits no one to be so transported by the dignitas of public deeds as to pay no mind to tranquility.” Civic duty is done best by a sage capable of serenity but able to take action: that was Cicero’s ideal. He was a politician, however, and he bartered ideals for f­ avors and office. In this practical employment, cum dignitate otium was a slogan, like ‘make Amer­i­ca ­great again.’59 Surveying the grounds of this serenity, Cicero collected a j­umble of attitudes, institutions, powers, and practices whose unstated framework was in no way tranquil—­the ‘­career in office’ (cursus honorum) of a R oman politician. To defend this miscellany and promote it, he warned, required “a g­ reat heart, a ­great mind, and ­great per­sis­tence.” But when his rivals drove him off the public stage, they foreclosed the third virtue, constantia. Reflecting on his calamity, he complained that exile also deprived him of his “former dignitas” but allowed that returning from the wilderness restored it. Dignitas came and went. Cicero’s versatility was staggering. While out of office, he wrote to a friend and reviewed his c­ areer, concluding that “always sticking with a single position has never won praise for leaders who govern the state. . . . ​ Although all of us—as I’ve said so often—­should always aim at dignitas with tranquility, our obligation is keep our goal the same, not to say the same t­ hing.” No m ­ atter what, the best p ­ eople wanted otium with their dignitas, what­ever one might call it.

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Nimble speech was the juice of rhe­toric, Cicero’s trade. The orator also needed a moral compass, however, requiring good character, not just clever language. Accordingly, “nothing is more desirable than dignitas” when speaking in public on state policy. Eff ective counsel takes the long view, looking past quick fixes and the mere expediency (utilitas) that sells dignitas short, according to Cicero’s On the Orator. The same work gives instruction about a v ariety of topics—­courage, justice, wisdom, and other virtues—­that came up frequently in public speaking. Wisdom, for example, would appeal to an audience as a s age’s shield against misfortune, a way to “hold on to dignitas when t­ hings get rough.” 60 A good man (­women seldom mattered) would get credit for not being broken by adversity and thus maintaining his stature, which Cicero—by his own account—­could not manage. Perhaps the dignitas that came and went was tied to office or current aff airs, a contingency of status, while a dif­fer­ent dignitas was a c haracter trait that survived bad t imes, or even prospered. If Cicero allowed such a d istinction, he must have had yet another dignitas in mind when he described the fifth part of rhe­toric, the delivery of a speech, as needing both dignitas and venustas. Just as dignitas went with otium in politics, so in rhe­toric—­and wherever aesthetic judgments applied—­its companion was venustas.61 When speech was artful, the speaker chose among types of prose, levels of diction, patterns of rhythm, and other ele­ments of style. The skilled orator also knew that nature is the m ­ other of art: she has arranged ­t hings—­items in the world reflected by items of language—so that “what has the most usefulness (utilitas) in it is the same ­t hing that has the most value (dignitas) and often beauty (venustas) as well.” This decorous utilitas was never merely expedient, and the associated dignitas was not dissolved by pragmatic choices. Moreover, the venustas linked with oratorical dignitas and utility was no trivial beauty: Romans also saw it in the order of the heavens, the frame of the h ­ uman body, and the designs of art and artifice.62 Public monuments have grace (decorum), like the fitness of a ­temple whose parts fit one another and that fits the place where it stands. The columns holding the t­ emple up are also useful, however, and the pediment above is not just decorative: “the t­ emple’s dignitas results from the utilitas of its pediment.” Private ­houses also have such qualities. Cicero had thought about them, having lost his own ­house on the Palatine to exile. Another h ­ ouse on the same hill was “full of dignitas,” a po­liti­cal asset for



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the own­er: “In fact, dignitas can be supplied by a ­house, though not wholly obtained from it.” The dignitas that could be had from a building could also be watched in a face, a body, a posture, and gestures—­a ll tools of the orator. Cicero had much to say about this bodily dignitas in his most impor­tant statement of moral theory, On Duties, which pairs it with venustas. The two are “types of beauty.” Dignitas is male beauty, venustas is female: grace, charm, elegance, loveliness, comeliness.63 Cicero was not thinking just about inner beauty or inward grace. The dignitas that went with venustas as a feature of bodies and buildings was on display—­shown in order to be seen. He analyzed it by Romanizing Stoic ethics, starting with kathêkon or ‘appropriate action.’ He Latinized the Greek word as officium or ‘duty,’ a narrower term in his native language. He also took a novel approach to the usual four virtues. Instead of the elusive sophrosunê—­often translated as ‘temperance,’ though hard to render—­ his fourth is to prepon or decorum in Latin, what is seemly or fitting.64 What fits can be abstract, like many ­things that are dignus, an ancestor of dignitas. Dignus is an adjective, ‘worth’ or ‘worthy,’ as in this noncommittal disjunction: ‘worth seeking’ or e­ lse ‘worth avoiding’; for any content, one phrase cancels the other. Like their Greek analogs, however, Latin words of this f­ amily connote what can be sensed and judged aesthetically. Experts on etymology trace decorum, dignitas, and dignus to decet, an impersonal verb that glides from aesthetic to moral values when something ‘is becoming.’ If a ­thing ‘is comely,’ another sense of decet, it has a body or is made of ­matter: not often if it ‘is seemly,’ on the other hand, and not necessarily if it ‘is becoming.’65 It becomes a good person to follow nature, the matrix of the four virtues and the best guide to governing the appetites and controlling the passions. The sage who does his duty ­w ill realize “how far ­human nature surpasses the c­ attle and other animals who feel nothing but plea­sure, . . . ​ whereas the h ­ uman mind feeds on learning and thinking, . . . ​directed by delight in seeing and hearing.” When p ­ eople go too far with sensual delights, they feel ashamed b ­ ecause “the body’s plea­sure does not r­ eally befit mankind’s superiority. . . . ​If we choose to consider what excellence and dignitas ­t here is in our nature, we w ­ ill realize how repulsive it is to ooze away in dissipation.” 66 This passage from Cicero’s study of duties has been called “the earliest evidence in Latin for the dignity of ­human nature,” and maybe it is. Nonetheless, his dignitas is a many-­splendored t­ hing, sometimes as banal as the

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lyr­ics of a pop song. In high-­minded tones, Marcus the phi­los­o­pher theorized about it, but theory never hobbled Tullius the politician, who used the word just as he pleased, to suit his momentary interests. Cheapened by Roman politics, dignitas still always expressed value, but its core was pragmatic and po­liti­cal, extending to moral, aesthetic, rhetorical, and social purposes. Status, office, rank, and socioeconomic resources w ­ ere usually in play. The values in question w ­ ere usually ­human, belonging to a single person. But groups of ­humans (the state, an audience) as well as nonhuman t­ hings (the universe, a building, a speech) could also have dignitas, ­whether they w ­ ere natu­ral (a tree) or artificial (a ­temple).67 When the judgments ­were aesthetic, however, not all ­humans had access to dignitas, which in that case was gendered: in a beautiful w ­ oman, venustas was the analog of a handsome man’s bodily dignitas. When the stakes w ­ ere po­liti­cal, male dignitas required otium, excluding all ­women and ­children and most men too—­a ll the enslaved and nearly all o ­ thers, who, even if they ­were citizens, could not aff ord the civic involvement that Cicero expected. The few ­free adult males who could pay the price for dignitas might lose it and then regain it: it was transitory and circumstantial, not inalienable. In fact, as we examine Cicero’s dignitas, its features are hard to pin down: external or internal, vis­i­ble or invisible, material or immaterial, physical or psychological, bodily or nonbodily? Dignitas depended on the situation.

6. ​Christian Dignitas Did a sordid past in Roman politics take dignitas off the ­table for some early Christians? The word never occurs in the Latin New Testament, which uses many words like it—­abstract nouns ending in -­itas—­especially for theological purposes in the Epistles. Besides ‘love’ (caritas) and ‘truth’ (veritas), which are everywhere, other such abstractions entered the Holy Writ that bypassed dignitas: the new Christian utilitas, for example, was the kind that Cicero discussed, though the tranquillitas in the Gospels was good weather, not moral poise. Dignitas got no blessing at all from the Bible’s distinctly Christian part, and not much notice from the older Jewish books: of thirteen uses ­there, six are in apocryphal writings. Since scripture was nearly a blank slate for dignitas, the first Christians could make of it what they would. That something would be made of it was likely ­because the word was so common in Latin. And b ­ ecause Chris­tian­ity is a



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bookish religion, the Bible was bound to play a role—­despite its reticence on this point.68 The holy book alone, framing all experience for the faithful, was enough to make Christian dignitas not the pagan kind known to Cicero. A f ew ­ ere especially words (not including dignitas) from the opening of the Bible w formative: “Let us make man in our image, a­ fter our likeness.” This passage from Genesis inspired an early and anonymous medieval meditation: We recognize the dignitas of the h ­ uman condition to be so g­ reat that man was created not only by the words of the One giving the o ­ rders—­like the works of the other six days—­but by the ­w ill of the blessed Trinity and by an act of divine lordliness, so that man would understand from the honor of his original condition how much he owes his Creator, in keeping with the privilege that the Creator bestowed on him in his original state of dignitas. . . . ​A lso, ­t here is another trinity in man’s soul, which was created in the image of its Creator—­t he supreme and perfect Trinity, in fact, which is in the ­Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And while the soul has a single nature, yet it has three dignitates in it: intellect, ­w ill, and memory, . . . ​not three souls in one body, but a single soul having three dignitates. In t­ hese three, our inner person miraculously carries God’s image in his own nature, and from them—as if from the  soul’s more outstanding dignitates—we are commanded to love the Creator. . . . What greater honor could a h ­ uman have than to be created in the likeness of his maker? . . . ​Or what could disgrace a person more, what unhappiness could be more miserable, than to lose the glory of his Creator’s likeness and sink into ugliness and absence of reason, the likeness of brute beasts? . . . ​Hence, whoever takes careful note of the excellence (excellentia) of his original condition and recognizes in himself the venerable image (imago) of the blessed Trinity, let him strive—by better be­hav­ior, by practicing the virtues, by the dignitas that comes with merit—­a lso to have the honor (honor) of the divine likeness (similitudo) in which he has been created, so that when this likeness appears as it is, he may appear like the One who by a miracle created him, in the first Adam, in his own likeness, and then, in the second Adam, gave him new form by a greater miracle.69

­ ere’s nothing ­here about politics, and the unknown author has come a Th long way from Cicero. He has threaded his commentary on a s tring of

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Bible verses, starting with Genesis. ­Humans, endowed with the primal excellence that mirrors the Creator’s image, can also win the dignitas that “comes with merit,” adding the honor of the divine likeness by virtuous be­hav­ior: excellentia is inborn, but honor comes with the dignitas that rewards good conduct. Honor has its counterpoint in disgrace, however—­ the price of losing the divine likeness and reverting to animal ugliness. ­Humans can forfeit their resemblance to God. To avoid this degradation, they must never stop imitating the Creator who gave them his own image. But God in this persona (as distinct from Christ) is bodiless and invisible. How could embodied ­humans have a bodiless Creator’s likeness? One answer lies in parts or powers or faculties of the soul. According to Augustine, the h ­ uman soul has many tripartitions. One of them is intellect, w ­ ill, and memory—as in the anonymous medieval treatise on the h ­ uman condition. The soul’s threefold character is one pole of an analogy; the other is the divine Trinity: neither is bodily. Hence, God’s unseen likeness could be ­ uman composite. “The first found in the immaterial component of the h Adam,” made in this likeness by the Creator, fell from grace. But God redeemed the “second Adam” in a n ew form. The first Adam had been made “for sensual life (eis psuchên zôsan),” according to Paul; the second was destined “for life-­giving spirit (eis pneuma zôopoioun).” In Paul’s psy­ chol­ogy, soul or life (psuchê) is intermediate between the unredeemed flesh (sarx) and the redemptive spirit (pneuma).70 As in the triad of intellect, ­will, and memory, the unseen Trinity also showed up in the spirit, the soul, and (by way of Christ’s ­human nature) the flesh. For the saved, the grace of Jesus redeemed even the sinful body, endowing the corruptible frame of the first Adam with a new glory. Salvation would “change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorified body”—­the transfigured body of the resurrected Christ. Worshipped as the etherized skeleton of h ­ uman worth, God’s triadic image—­ fouled by sin in earthly souls but restored to glory in heaven—­was a distinctly Christian notion. The dignitas bestowed by the image was worthiness and also rank, gauged theologically as higher or lower, merited or unmerited, saved or lost. Given by creation, it could be taken away by damnation, and ­there was none at all in the fallen Adam’s body or Eve’s corrupted flesh. Intellect, w ­ ill, and memory mirrored the Godhead ­because they ­were not bodily: they ­were dignitates in the plural and dematerialized.71 Other speakers for the Christian faith repeated themes of this anonymous text. Exactly when they found their voices is hard to say, though the



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text itself was discussed by the twelfth ­century, when Augustine’s views on the soul’s triads excited controversy. Although editors have linked e­ arlier authors—­Ambrose and Augustine—­with the tract as it stands, Alcuin prob­ably produced it four centuries ­later, around the year 800.72 Christian expositions of dignitas came even ­earlier from Pope Leo  I, who died in 461: they are sermons, securely dated and from an authoritative source. During Leo’s assertive papacy, Christ’s place in the Trinity was a contentious issue. One conundrum was the Savior’s two natures, divine and ­human, the latter redeeming all humanity when the Word was made flesh. Leo’s solution was to promote a theology of incarnation in his preaching, explaining how, why, and with what results God became h ­ uman, suffered in the body, and died. Leo’s sermons show dignitas fully assimilated in a Christian vocabulary.73 The pope used the word often, sometimes in a po­liti­cal sense to describe his own primacy or “apostolic dignitas,” a supremacy contrasting with his lowliness (humilitas) as Peter’s successor.74 Besides the papal office, other ­things in which he discovered dignitas ­were feast days, martyrdom, rites, virtues, the name ‘Christian’ itself, and the place (much disputed) of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. Christ’s kingly standing also has it, despite mockery by Jews. Even so, the name ‘Israel’ has this value too when it designates the chosen ­people, their elders, and their priests—­though the high priest Caiaphas abandoned priestly dignitas by plotting against Jesus.75 Scripture has dignitas as long as Christians—­not Jews—­interpret it. When the faithful read the Bible, they see God’s image at work in the epic of salvation through Christ’s incarnation, passion, resurrection, and transfiguration. Salvation history begins with man’s creation “in the image of God in order to imitate his maker,” which is the only way for the “dignitas of divine majesty to be in us.” Though God himself gave Adam this standing, what the first h ­ uman wanted was higher angelic rank, an arrogant desire that cost him “the dignitas of his own nature, as he took on the sickly condition that we have.” Mankind’s primal state was worth a g­ reat deal, but Adam squandered its value, losing it for all humankind u ­ ntil Christ 76 restored it with new merit to augment the original. Leo implored his flock to “wake up and recognize the dignitas of your nature. . . . ​Since you have been made to share the divine nature, do not turn back and revert to your old vileness (vilitas).” We h ­ umans can gain the “dignitas of God’s glory” only if his mercy and truth are in us, an issue to be settled by the spirit’s strug­gle against the flesh: “If the body’s desires

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are stronger, the mind loses its own dignitas in disgrace.” The spirit shows its worth—­the best of the ­human person—by mastering the flesh.77 A saving paradox—­“ it deserves belief b ­ ecause it is absurd,” said Tertullian—is that the divine Word became flesh, suff ered, and died. “When the Lord of the universe took the form of a slave,” Leo wrote, “he covered up his majestic dignitas with darkness.” But then, by suff ering in the body, he “restored its lost dignitas to our nature, which had fallen overboard from the ark of eternity.” ­Later, the transfigured Jesus “revealed the excellence of his own hidden dignitas.” The Apostles had realized that God’s majesty was in the Word, but they could see no sign of it “in the body that covered up divinity. . . . ​While they w ­ ere still wrapped in mortal flesh, t­ here was no way for them to look and see it.” Just as the Lord’s flesh had cloaked his glory, the bodies of his disciples also blinded them to it. But fi­nally, when the Savior ascended to heaven, humanity recovered its dignitas by proxy. “The nature of humankind r­ ose up beyond the dignitas of all heavenly creatures, above the o ­ rders of angels.”78 The first ­human nature to soar so high—­redeemed by the Redeemer’s birth and death in the body—­was Christ’s, who also has a divine nature. At its best, ordinary ­human nature, unresurrected and unglorified, is spirit, not soul, which is tainted by the body that it enlivens. Man’s noblest, spiritual nature transcends this mortal body. To be exalted, our vile bodies must be changed, made “like unto his glorified body” a­ fter the transfigura­ uman person must be tion. To be nourished by Christian dignitas, the h spiritualized, and the ­human body must become what it never was or could be—­entirely glorious. For ordinary mortals, Christian dignitas was pie in the sky.79 “Concentrate on eternity,” then, “and leave the temporal ­behind”: the instruction comes from a tract On the Worth (dignitas) and Wretchedness (miseria) of the H ­ uman Condition, undated and previously attributed to Anselm of Canterbury, who died in 1109. This ­little devotional piece resembles other Christian treatments of the topic, though with refinements, one of which develops the distinction between the divine image in man and the likeness. The image is “worthier” (dignior) ­because animals may resemble ­humans by likeness (similitudo) whereas “none but another ­human has the image (imago) of a h ­ uman.” Applying a parallel distinction to meritorious acts, Christians—­like ancient pagans—­can practice natu­ral virtues to perfect God’s likeness in us. But enacting the divine image means “­doing what God does eternally” by remembering, understanding,



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and loving the Best of all, which is God. “For salvation,” through this triad of psychic acts, “you ­will express the dignitas of your creation,” a state so elevated that its glory is incomprehensible. This unspeakable glory is real, if ethereal, and the incarnate God has rescued it for sinners striving to be righ­teous. Meanwhile, vainglory and foolish joy are traps to be avoided by shunning the world’s “parade of dignitates” and attending to “the miseries of the pre­sent life.” Life itself is a shaky bridge over the chasm of hell. Having exalted the divine in man’s spirit, the same writer bewails the body’s state at the end of life in language meant to disgust and horrify. In death the flesh ­will be “stinking and pitiful, consumed by rot and worms.” Crawling through e­ very portal of the senses, vermin stuff the throat and belly to make “the body’s ­whole frame melt away in rot.” 80 The ­whole world—­not just the ­human body—­disgusted some Christians, even though God created the universe and called it “very good.” The revulsion was an old reflex: Eucherius, Bishop of Lyon in the fifth ­century, wrote a letter urging his cousin to despise (contemno) the world, making a case that still persuaded Anselm. Although Anselm left no treatise On Despising the World (De contemptu mundi), his writings reveal that the idea shadowed his days in the cloister. Since God’s heavenly perfection is the only au­then­tic good, he concluded, and nothing ­else has real value, the world’s illusory benefits must be scorned. As Eucherius had told his cousin, “two ­things especially . . . ​bind p ­ eople to the world’s business, snare them by charming their senses and chain them with seductive love: plea­sure in wealth and dignitas from honors. The first should be called ‘want,’ not plea­sure, and the name of the next should be ‘emptiness,’ not dignitas. Both are infections . . . ​in the ­human heart.” Cardinal Lotario dei Segni—­ like Anselm—­heard this message of scorn for the world without addressing it at length. But he wrote an unforgettable book on a related topic: ­human wretchedness (miseria).81 Many Christians have preached hatred of h ­ uman nature, but none made a statement more revolting than Lotario’s Wretchedness of the ­Human Condition, finished in 1195. Focusing on the vileness (vilitas) of being ­human, the cardinal also promised to “describe its dignitas, . . . ​by humbling the exalted in the pre­sent work, then in the next one exalting the ­humble.” Only humility could overcome pride, he reasoned, the sin of our first parents, and God’s incarnation was the exemplary act of humility, “making himself nothing by . . . ​being made in man’s likeness,” according

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to the Epistles. Jesus himself taught that “whoever h ­ umbles himself w ­ ill be exalted, whoever exalts himself w ­ ill be humbled.” By vilifying the h ­ uman condition, the faithful w ­ ill demean themselves to follow the Gospel—­a righ­teous degradation that w ­ ill also abase the world, as Eucherius had recommended.82 Lotario never kept his promise to exalt the ­humble. Was exaltation less entertaining than misery? Within three years of writing De miseria, he was just too busy, reigning as Pope Innocent III. For almost two de­cades he ruled with ­great energy, chastising heretics, launching crusades, organ­ izing a g­ reat ecclesiastical council, frustrating lay authorities, and aggrandizing his own office. Like Leo the G ­ reat, he promoted papal primacy with skill and zeal. T ­ oday, however, more ­people remember him for his polemic on misery than for any of that. No won­der: the language is unforgettable, what­ever one thinks of the message.83 Right from the start, ­every ­human is lost. Every­one is born naked, weak, and defiled, covered by blood—­“filthy to describe, filthy to hear about, filthiest of all to look at. . . . ​Oh, the vile worthlessness (indignitas) of the ­human condition, the unworthy state of h ­ uman vileness (vilitas)!” Clearly, dignitas was on Lotario’s mind, even though his subject was the opposite. He treated dignitas as rank and status—­worse than a distraction, an occasion of sin. It incites the ambitious, the power-­hungry lust for it, and the proud confuse it with genuine honor. An arrogant person “reckons that his dignitas gets more from him than he gets from his dignitas.” But in the end “power and dignitas lie deformed in the dust.” 84 ­Until the body returns to dust, its flesh is a prison, and Lotario assumed that every­one wanted to escape. “Surely, if you ­don’t want to get out of the body, you d ­ on’t want to get out of prison, since the body is the prison of the soul.” As long as flesh entombs the spirit, “fear and trembling are all around, toil and pain are everywhere.” For the saved, release w ­ ill come when the body dies, but for the damned the body’s sorry tale is a glimpse into hell. When Cicero warned that the body’s pleasures could eliminate dignitas, his language was genteel, whereas the cardinal’s is hysterical. The body is doomed to be vile by its ­matter, “food for the undying worm that keeps gnawing and eating.” Lotario speaks directly to the body, taunting it as the dirt of creation and corruption: “Why are you proud?” he asks the body’s mud. “What exalts you, dust? Ashes, why, do you boast?” 85 Job had a similar conversation with decay, saying, “You are my f­ ather,” and telling the worms, “You are my m ­ other and s­ ister.” This prompted



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Lotario to review the body’s w ­ hole sad story: “How filthy the f­ ather, how vile the m ­ other, how horrid the ­sister! Man is conceived from blood rotted by the heat of lust, and at the end the worms attend his corpse like pall-­ bearers. Alive, he breeds lice and parasites. Dead, he ­will produce worms and flies. When he lives, shit and vomit are his products, rot and stench when he dies.” 86 Coming from any author, so much guignol would be ­grand and memorable. With a pope’s name attached, it became immortal. Cardinal Lotario could not have painted a scene much more repellent, by any standards—or more repugnant to any conception of dignity. And yet his rant about the ­human condition only amplified familiar Christian attitudes. Still, why this gruesome polemic became a target for Manetti and ­others is easy to see—­with or without a pontifical signature.

7. ​Manetti’s Dignitas 2 The cardinal’s book on misery stunned its readers, including Petrarch, who noticed the author’s unkept promise to make a contrary case for dig­ hether to attempt what Lotario could not deliver, the nitas. Considering w poet concluded that defending dignitas would be harder than attacking ­because “­human misery is most extensive, while happiness is small.” In his view, this dour assessment reflected prior Christian experience: he claimed that no one before him had even tried to “investigate the dignitas of the ­human condition.” When Antonio da Barga, Facio, and Manetti set out to finish the job, Lotario’s denunciation of humanity was the state of the art.87 Antonio agreed with Petrarch “that in bygone days no ­earlier poets, theologians, or orators wrote anything on this exceptional topic.” He presented his own contribution as just a sketch and copied a fourth of it from Peter Lombard’s Sentences—­for Facio to refine and expand. What interested him most was the glorified body, which also held much of Facio’s attention. Most of his themes, almost entirely otherworldly, are also Facio’s, including immortality, the afterlife, and the architecture of the soul’s resemblance to God. Facio cared a ­little more about ­humans acting in this world, but not much, and his classicism was a veneer on patristic and medieval piety.88 Neither Facio nor Antonio complained about Lotario’s tirade against humanity: they wanted to complete his proj­ect, not refute it, assuming that a pope, not a mere cardinal, had written the book. But Manetti explic­itly contradicted Innocent III and attacked his message with gusto. Why his

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assault was so unguarded is unclear: maybe ­because he was writing for a king and competing with a rival, Facio, who had dedicated his own eff ort to a pope. Who knows? No nuance of patronage was too subtle for a Florentine diplomat to manipulate. Sincerity is also a possibility: maybe Manetti simply found Lotario’s invective as loathsome as it is.89 Nonetheless, the heart of Manetti’s optimist Christian anthropology is a transcendent ideal: what makes imperfect, embodied h ­ umans like a perfect, bodiless God is immortality. And yet other facts about ­humans show goodness—­another divine ideal—to be immanent in them and their earthly world, governed with providential care. The natu­ral state of ­humans is original justice, not original sin, which defiles nature but does not liquidate it. ­Human life on earth is happy, even joyous, made so by pleasures—­including sexual pleasure—­that are good and part of God’s plan. A sublime piece of God’s craftwork is the ­human body—­including the naked body, outside and inside, guts and all—­whose image in art is mankind’s vis­i­ble divinity, ­whether painted on a church wall or carved in antique marble. The art itself—­like technology and other products of material culture—­manifests ­human thought in action. Energy, eff ort, ingenuity, and invention are forces of material, cultural, and intellectual pro­gress.90 ‘Progressive’ is the right word—­adjusted for time and place—­for ­these attitudes of Manetti’s. To call them enlightened—­remarkably so in contrast to Innocent’s, Antonio’s, or Facio’s—is fair to his ideas about dignitas, though he was not thinking about the dignity in­ven­ted by Kant in the Enlightenment. B ­ ecause he honored the wisdom of pagans while venerating sages of his own faith, he could search for dignitas in many places. What he brought back is thin and disappointing, however, if readers want to know what dignitas meant to him. To be sure, he uses the word more often than Pico would in his Oration. But in a book of 31,000 words—148 pages in the standard edition—it comes up only once ­every seven pages or so, barely enough to sustain dignitas as a theme. In almost all instances, what dignitas belongs to is homo or something ­ uman race, humanus. All but uniquely, it is a f eature of mankind, the h ­human nature, man’s first ancestors, the h ­ uman soul and its faculties, or the h ­ uman body and its parts. Exceptionally, it also describes Manetti’s book, though only once. The general point is clear: dignitas is h ­ uman, and h ­ umans have dignitas. Other­wise, we learn very l­ ittle. Mankind has something—­call it d for dignity. In Manetti’s inflated prose, we see d



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associated—­repetitiously—­with other ­things, x, y, z, and so on. d goes along, in vari­ous ways, with x, y, z, and the o ­ thers: that’s the ­whole story, as far as conceptualizing d is concerned.91 ­Others, however, both pre­de­ces­sors and contemporaries, ­were more curious about dignitas, and Manetti himself paid more attention to other words. He examined technical terms from medicine, philosophy, and theology; he had strong views about translating biblical Hebrew and Greek; and he wondered w ­ hether anima or animus was the right term for a soul.92 Interpretations of imago and similitudo are especially prominent in his book—­not of dignitas, however, despite its importance for him.93 Peter Lombard, whose Sentences Manetti cited, distinguished dignitas from related terms applied to the seven o ­ rders (ordines) of clergy—­the priesthood preceded by six lower grades of deacons, subdeacons, acolytes, and so on. The sacrament of Holy ­Orders confers ­these ­orders by ‘ordination.’ Some ordained priests become bishops, higher in rank, by being consecrated—­not ordained a s econd time—­and consecration is not, like ordination, a sacrament. Likewise, ‘bishop’ is not the name of an ordo, as Peter notes, though it is the name of an office (officium) together with a dignitas. “Greek episcopi are ‘overseers’ in Latin,” he explains; they are “put in charge and so called from watching over or examining the lives and conduct of subordinates.” The bishop’s ‘office’ is this role or function of overseeing, and a ‘rank’ or dignitas goes with it.94 Peter does not say exactly what dignitas amounts to in this hierarchy, but hierarchy is clearly his concern as he discusses the terminology. Manetti shows no such curiosity about the dignitas in his own vocabulary. ­Because he gives no description or definition of the word, he cannot make an argument (A) like the following, where d stands for dignity, and x, y, and z are features of d: p0 p1 p2 c

x, y, and z belong to d; what­ever has x, y, and / or z has d; h ­ umans have x, y, and / or z; therefore, ­humans have d.

He often asserts the conclusion (c) of this argument; he states the minor premise (p2) even more often; and sometimes he suggests the major premise (p1); but for d he supplies no definitional or descriptive statement like ­ ecause he provides no conceptual clarity about d—­a thematic p0. Hence, b concept for his book—he can make no argument that requires a c lear

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concept of d. If dignitas, excellentia, and praestantia can all be said of ­humans, what value does dignitas add? Manetti has nothing to say. Quarreling with a p ope about the ­human condition, he insists that h ­ umans have dignitas without saying what it is, even though o ­ thers w ­ ere asking definitional questions about such ideas. Matteo Palmieri’s book On Civic Life, for example, was circulating in Italy before Manetti de­cided to answer Lotario. Palmieri wrote that “each one’s standing (dignità) is the basis on which public honors are distributed. In a commonwealth, it’s difficult to determine whose standing is greater ­because of vari­ous disagreements about it. The noble and power­ful say that standing is to be located in abundant resources and old, aristocratic families. Populists put it in well-­ meaning talk among the cultured about living f­ ree and in peace. The learned call it the ability to get t­ hings done.”95 ­Because his focus is sociopo­ liti­cal, Palmieri starts by describing dignità more or less as Cicero had, as status that comes with public office and civic engagement. Then he examines it as a s ocioeconomic commodity, a cultural ideal, and a t ool of politics—­competing versions of dignità. For Manetti, however, dignitas is not a contested item; his prob­lem is which creatures have how much of it, not what it is. As a result, his pre­sen­ta­tion of d is vague—in an account whose structure is s­ imple, yet with enough detail to fill four books: the first three deal with the body, the soul, and the body / soul composite; the fourth refutes the case against d in ­humans, focusing on Lotario’s harangue. Long excerpts from Cicero and Lactantius are most of Manetti’s first book, where Lactantius mentions dignitas only once, while admiring the ­human torso. Elsewhere, he seldom uses the word—­which is surprising, since he has been called the ‘Christian Cicero.’ Manetti’s large piece of Cicero comes from a study of religion, On the Nature of the Gods, which argues for divine providence from order in nature—­especially ­human nature. Erect stature, nimble fin­gers, well-­placed organs of sense, powers of speech and reason, and other endowments are marks of design in ­humans, hence of divine forethought immanent in the world. For Lactantius, however, God’s foresight is transcendent and also personal, flowing from the Creator’s mind and ­will, though the proofs are much the same. ­Human features too orderly to be accidental are nearly unique—­either rare elsewhere in nature or missing. Mankind is extraordinary, standing out from the rest of nature and surpassing every­thing ­else.96 Like Lactantius writing On God’s Craftwork and Cicero On the Nature ­ uman features to argue that h ­ umans of the Gods, Manetti reviewed a set of h



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have another, smaller set, including d. The first list is long and detailed, containing many more items than the second, which is derived by induction—­ informally and rhetorically—­from the first. The induction can fail at any step b ­ ecause of one creaturely defect or another. Nothing in the longer list entails that d is not contingent. Suppose reason is distinctive of ­humans, for example, and that reasoning enhances wisdom, which might be evidence of d. Nonetheless, rationality sometimes breeds cynicism rather than wisdom. Or immortality: d might result from enjoying endless life. On the other hand, living forever might be boring. Or grant that rational and immortal ­humans ­were created in God’s image: the Creator’s majesty might show up as d in such creatures. Assets of divine majesty are bodiless and perfect in e­ very way, however: could they deliver d to imperfect, embodied h ­ umans? Omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and so on cannot be finite, bodily, or humanized. Manetti never tries to show that d belongs to ­every ­human—to mankind’s essence—or even what d is. If d ­were Kantian dignity, and intrinsic worth w ­ ere on the x, y, z list for argument A, the inference might work better than for rationality or immortality: in such cases, the argument collapses with failings of individuals. To shore it up, Manetti needed a proposition p0 in argument A that would give a satisfactory definition or a workable description of an essential dignitas, which he never supplied. Lacking a better account of dignitas by Manetti, where ­else to look for what he may have assumed without ever saying it? His statements that include the word—­not quite two dozen—­give ­little to go on. Widening the search to include dignus, the adjective cognate with the noun, more than doubles the information. One use of dignus can be eliminated, however: the much repeated memoratu dignus or ‘worth mentioning.’ Subtracting it leaves about fifty cases where other words used with dignus or dignitas say something instructive. Most pairings with other words occur only once, and in e­ very instance the other word is inherently positive or positively meant. The aggregate good news is about fitness, power, rank, size, and stature. Associated words used more than once—to deliver the same message—­ are ‘excellent’ (excellens), ‘­great’ (magnus), ‘lofty’ (sublimis), ‘outstanding’ (praestans) and ‘wonderful’ (admirabilis). In keeping with the title of his book, excellentia is Manetti’s most frequent pairing for dignitas, and praestantia comes next. ­Humans have dignitas, and they excel, standing out from every­t hing around them. Creatures thus equipped surpass the rest

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of creation. The word is relative, expressing rank and superiority. The d in question is neither unrelatable nor intrinsic nor incomparable. Understood in Manetti’s way, dignitas feeds on comparison and starves without it.97 Ever since Kant theorized about Würde, the debate about ‘dignity’ has gone on and on. By identifying the Latin dignitas with Würde, he encouraged ­others to look for his ideas in Pico’s misnamed Oration. Suppose the bad title had been dif­fer­ent and the speech had been mislabeled in some other way, as an Oratio de hominis excellentia or De praestantia hominis—­ words from Manetti’s d vocabulary. Had Pico been thought to orate about ‘excellence’ or ‘superiority,’ would so much fuss have been made about the speech or about ‘humanist’ formulations of such ideas? Not likely. In ­human aff airs, where all the timber is crooked, how could anyone’s Würde excel or outrank anyone else’s—by Kantian standards? Kant’s modern dignity belongs incomparably to every­one.98

8. ​Manetti’s Dignitas 3 Not so for Manetti, whose dignitas is synonymous, more or less, with excellentia and praestantia. His dignitas evaluates and also excludes—as ancient Romans used the word to signify rank and status. No Roman w ­ oman, child, or slave could excel with dignitas. But Christian doctrine treated all soldiers of the Church militant as members of Christ’s spiritual body, battling the flesh to cross over from this vale of tears—on the road, at least, to a spiritualized dignitas. What about Muslims? Heathens in Brazil? Such cases would prove difficult. ­There was no doubt about unchurched Christians in hell, however, who ­were damned yet still ­human. ­Those poor souls had lost dignitas forever—­more pitiful than Adam, whose loss was redeemed.99 Among the deadliest sins of the damned, all seven can be bodily, and three—­gluttony, lust, and sloth—­must be, to some extent. The body is a cesspool of sin: this was the papal verdict challenged by Manetti. His rebuttal produced no clear concept of dignitas, but he accomplished something ­else by revaluing the body and showing esteem for ­human energy and ingenuity—­especially in art and technology. He made most of his comments on the body in the first and fourth books of his work, though much of this came straight from Cicero and Lactantius. But the refutation of h ­ uman misery in the fourth book is all Manetti.100



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A preliminary move sets Lotario up by restating his vituperation of the body: weak, naked, fragile, rotten, short-­lived, defective in its senses, self-­ destructive in its actions, vulnerable to the least threats of injury and disease, the flesh never recovers from its origin in the filthiest ­matter—­the slime of the earth and the stink of menstruation. The papal screed is haphazard, Manetti complains, though evidently hard to forget: “He goes on endlessly with a v ariety of remarks about many disadvantages of the ­human body: the nakedness, the lice, the spit, piss, shit, fleeting time, old age, the dif­fer­ent pains that mortals suff er as they toil, the vari­ous ­things that ­people try to do, the nearness of death and many types of torment.” To ­counter all this, he points out that what is “superb and delightful” in the ­human condition was put t­ here by God almighty, so that we should always “live with joy and cheer in this world.” Plea­sure is God’s gift—­not a pitfall—­ and normal in ­human life. The external senses give ­great delight, and the internal senses also contribute to a “profuse sufficiency of pleasures.” In daily life, which sense is most enjoyable? Eating is certainly good. We must eat to live. Food and drink are tasty, better than most sensations of touch—­ except for the “touch specific to the genitals.” Phi­los­o­phers say that “far greater pleasures are felt in sex” ­because nature’s purpose was “to preserve the species more than individuals, the one by sex between male and female, the other by taking nourishment.”101 The body’s plea­sure is delightful, says Manetti, and sex is best of all. This was not Lotario’s verdict. “Who does not know,” he had asked, “that copulation, even in marriage, never happens without the flesh itching, without heated lust, without the rank stench of excess?” Coming from this mire, semen is defiled and pollutes the soul, “like liquid poured from a corrupted vessel.” What­ever the body excretes is unclean, says Lotario, but a boon according to Manetti. Think of “how scientists describe saliva, urine, feces, and hair” as remedies, antidotes, and fertilizers. Plainly, ­every bit of Lotario’s blaming had to be turned into praise.102 Provoked again by Job, Lotario gave a chapter to nakedness: “Naked I came out of my ­mother’s womb, naked ­shall I return ­there.” The cardinal charged that ­humans emerge bare, filthy, and defenseless from the gore of childbirth. Manetti’s retort, before defending the afterbirth as a physiological necessity, was that “it was fitting for ­humans to be born like this—­for the sake of grace and beauty.” If ­humans came into the world wearing hides or pelts, they would be as ugly as other animals, and man’s excellence would be covered up. But nature would never have concealed the ­human

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body, her most splendid production, “with ill-­fitting, hand-­me-­down veils.”103 Just ­because Lotario condemned nakedness, Manetti was compelled to praise it. But he also had other reasons that belonged to his own time and place, when Italians could see more and better nakedness than in Lotario’s day: in works of art. Although pictorial and sculptural art was almost always religious in the ­Middle Ages, some sacred scenes show ­people unclothed or nearly so. In the Hebrew Bible, ­after the creation of Adam and Eve, we also see Noah drunk and uncovered, David peeking at Uriah’s wife, and the elders leering at Susanna. Depictions of the Christian Gospels even show Jesus unclothed—­only partly, most of the time—­for his baptism and during his passion and burial. ­Humans roasting in purgatory have left flesh and bones ­behind, but souls depicted as bare bodies make the torment vis­i­ble and plausible. The dead unwind their shrouds at the Judgment. Some are saints, like Sebastian—­naked except for the arrows. Th ­ ere was no shortage of imagery to show off the skills of medieval artists.104 Still, just thinking of the male figure, ­t here is nothing in medieval art like Michelangelo’s David or Adam—or the Greco-­Roman artifacts that inspired Alberti, Botticelli, Donatello, Leonardo, Mantegna, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and ­others before Adam was pictured in the Sistine Chapel in 1511, just as Julius II was moving the Apollo Belvedere (penis missing, but no fig leaf) to the Vatican. A few years e­ arlier, Michelangelo had seen the male nudes of the Laocoon writhe out of excavated dirt. But Manetti died in 1459, long before t­ hese capital events of archaeology and the body’s apotheosis in sculpture and painting. At an ­earlier stage, however, he seems to have glimpsed this enormous change in ­human experience and attitudes.105 Praising the soul in the second book of his work, he set out to prove the “large scope and excellence” of its faculties by examining the “­great deeds and remarkable devices that ­people have thought up and in­ven­ted so admirably.” Ancient won­ders include the pyramids of Egypt but also the first ship, built by Jason for the Argonauts. Knowing how valuable the “technology of sailing” was to his own society, Manetti looked homeward for other feats of engineering, finding them in “new and more recent structures: how sharp was the mind of Filippo, called Brunelleschi, in our own day surely the prince of all architects, who constructed an amazingly large vault—no, the largest one of all—­for Florence’s T ­ emple with no wooden or



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iron armature, as stunning as that is to say!” Manetti, a Florentine, had to look no farther than his city’s proudest church for proof of supreme h ­ uman skill in architecture, and for the pictorial arts he could also stay at home. But first he ran through the usual list of ancient paint­ers and then added Phidias, Polycletus, and Praxitiles for sculpture. In painting, “what to say about our Giotto, the best painter of his time? . . . ​It seems right to add him in with t­ hese ancient and supreme masters of this art and compare them.” In sculpture, Ghiberti’s Doors of Paradise for Florence’s Baptistery equaled anything made by the Greeks. “What to report about Lorenzo,” he asked, “the most eminent sculptor of our time, whose outstanding and amazing talents are on public display, especially on the doors of our sacred T ­ emple 106 that he ennobled and glorified?” Was Manetti’s praise for the arts just patriotic boilerplate from a diplomat’s speeches? Maybe he just recited from a source, superficially, to describe a celebrated Aphrodite by Praxiteles so lovely “that it was hard to keep her safe and undefiled by the lustful embraces of bypassers.” The anecdote he chose from a book of moral examples has been toned down by comparison to other old tales about seductive statuary. Pliny, another authority that he knew, reported on the Venus of Praxiteles with less reserve, writing that “a certain person was so gripped by love for the statue that one night he hid away, hugging it close, and as evidence left the stain of his lust on the likeness.”107 Old rec­ords of the higher pornography captured a c ommon ­human response. When Manetti retailed one of ­these stories, while commending his city’s artistic glories, perhaps he said something genuine about feelings of two kinds, sexual and aesthetic, as they converged on the visual experience of art. A ­little speculation—­supported by chronology—is in order. By 1504, when Michelangelo finished his majestic David in marble, with a f ull frontal display of genitalia, Manetti had been dead for nearly half a ­century. He cannot have seen nudes by Botticelli or Leonardo—­who ­were still ­children when he died. Pollaiuolo was just leaving his ­father’s workshop. Mantegna made the St. Sebastians in Vienna and the Louvre ­after 1455: he was sketching nudes before then, however, though none that Manetti was likely to see. Most of the ­great Quattrocento images of unclothed ­humans ­were unavailable to him, with a n otable exception: Donatello’s bronze David, now in the Bargello (Figure 3). Some critics have doubted that David is the beautiful young boy—­naked except for high-­top sandals and a f etching cap. O ­ thers, naming Cosimo de’ M edici as the

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source of the commission, have dated the statue as early as the 1420s. Donatello had made a clothed David for public showing in Florence by 1416.108 Did Manetti ever see the nude David in bronze, the first casting of its kind since antiquity? Prob­ably so, given his position in Florentine society, since Donatello finished it before midcentury, when Manetti left Tuscany and died: some Florentines as well connected as the ambassador had already encountered the statue in the Medici Palace courtyard. In any case, since Mantegna and ­others ­were sketching nudes before Manetti started to write about dignitas, ventures so bold ­were ­under way in Italy for him to observe, and innovations in art impressed him, remarkable novelties like the “­great deeds” of Giotto, Ghiberti, and Brunelleschi.109 Still, though nudity, male and / or female, may have given Manetti delight and may have moved him to praise the body, his mea­sure of humankind at its Figure 3. ​David, bronze by best was still Christian and other- Donatello, Bargello, mid-­fifteenth worldly. ­Toward the close of his fourth ­century. book, trying to wind the story down, he dismissed warnings about h ­ uman trou­ bles ­because “from the first instant of birth ­until the end, ­there is always enjoyment at ­every moment.” But he refuted the contrary claims by invoking “the final resurrection of our bodies.” He believed that “when we rise again, then we ­shall certainly get our dead bodies back fully glorified and renewed, with no stain, no rot, no weakness, and no ugliness.” In perfect health and lasting youth, never needing sleep and without suff ering, we ­shall live again in a body something like Christ’s was at the age of thirty. This ­will be a transfigured, glorified body, “made to shine—­light, delicate, and altogether ­free of stain.” In the end, the damned ­will look up hope-



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lessly at the saved, whose fleshless bodies, denied to the unforgiven, ­will have been transformed by “brightness, delicacy, agility, lack of suff ering, beauty, and immortality.”110 ­Whether Manetti ever looked on beauty bare—by contemplating the body as idealized in Quattrocento art—he never abandoned a dif­fer­ent idealization, the glorified body as a likeness of the transfigured Christ. Any nobility in this precept of Christian dogma vanishes in the fairy tale of immortality—­a timeless paradise populated by bodies too glorious to be avatars of earthly originals. With many words, while maintaining that h ­ umans have dignitas, Manetti puts the body forward as evidence. But he fails both ways. His dignitas has no conceptual basis. And his glorified bodies cannot be pictured or even i­ magined. Imagine Aunt Fiona and U ­ ncle Fred called to glory, Fiona with her remarkable overbite, Fred as cross-­eyed as ever. Glorifying ­those beloved ­faces ­will deplete them, blocking any credible visualization. In any believable picture of the choir invisible, the bodies—­naked bodies especially—­ will look a l­ ittle vile b ­ ecause all bodies look a l­ ittle vile, at least—­even Adam’s on the Vatican ceiling, where Pater saw a “languid figure, . . . ​rude and satyr-­like.” His Adam “has hardly strength enough to lift his fin­ger,” and he says nothing. But his nakedness speaks more in silence about ­human dignity than Manetti ever could with all his words.111

9. ​Beyond Freedom and Dignity? Manetti’s praise of the body and of ­human energy and skill has earned applause, even though his orotund talk about dignitas was sketchy in content, mainly rhetorical, and vacuous at bottom. The scanty dignitas in Pico’s Oration is of no use at all to experts on dignity, which is not the subject of that speech. If Pico’s statement is useless and Manetti’s is uninteresting, why should students of the idea bother with the Re­nais­sance? For two reasons. First, history has made Pico—an icon of that age—­too big to fail. Second, habitual misconceptions of his Oration are symptoms of modern confusions about dignity of the post-­Kantian kind. ­Because Manetti’s book is the fullest Quattrocento treatment of dignitas, what he says about it is informative—­especially to show what Pico was not talking about.112 The strain on ‘dignity’ in modern times—as in Manetti’s day—­has been rhetorical in no small part, tempting many to the sin of bathos, a ‘depth’ to

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which one sinks by failing to rise. The internet—­what better barometer of vulgarity?—­calls it “an abrupt transition from a lofty style or g­ rand topic to a common or vulgar one.” The ‘lofty’ or ‘exalted’ or ‘sublime’ for ancient literary critics was hupsos or ‘height.’ Alexander Pope, in the Art of Sinking in Poetry, decreed that bathos was its opposite—­when attempted hupsos ends badly and exaltation drowns. Not all bathos is bad, however, if it goes deep enough—­like Christ’s love, which is both deep and high in the Epistle to the Ephesians. Bathos comes in types and degrees.113 ­Here is a mild case, headlined by the New York Times: Restore a Gateway to Dignity The words ­were meant to be stirring. The article they introduced explored a serious issue, plans to replace Penn Station, a major railway terminal in Manhattan. To “address the calamity that is Penn Station,” the author compared it with G ­ rand Central Station: passing through it was “an ennobling experience,” whereas Penn Station was “a humiliation”—­ hence the missing dignity and the call to restore it. But look: this is just journalism, New York City journalism in the Age of Hype, when any ­human misfortune qualifies as a ‘ tragedy’—­gasps from Aristotle notwithstanding. Why fret about a l­ ittle hyperbole? ­Because this bathos was about ‘dignity’ at ground level, not climbing for the stratosphere. Commonplace bathos sinks all around us, sometimes dragging ‘dignity’ down with it.114 A piece from the New Yorker about Anthony Trollope cashed in on a con­spic­u­ous expenditure of ‘dignity.’ Trollope, careful about time and money, could have modeled rationality for Max Weber. A writer himself like Trollope, the author of the New Yorker piece explained that “writers talking about time are like paint­ers talking about unprimed canvas and pigments.” Riding a crest of wit, he added an insider’s joke: “Nor is t­ here anything philistine about writers talking money. Inside the ballroom at the PEN banquet, it’s all freedom and dignity; outside, it’s all advances.”115 The author of the Penn Station article was serious about dignity in a train station—­just as Cicero was serious about dignified h ­ ouses on the Palatine. The author of the Trollope article knew that even ‘dignity’ could be funny if taken too seriously. The second article owed nothing to the first, just assuming that ‘dignity’ could do a comic turn. This is odd, considering the word’s grave prominence in such places as the UN “Declaration” of 1948, whose first ‘whereas’ states that “recognition of the inherent



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dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the ­human ­family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”116 Freedom, justice, and peace are serious ­matters. By proclaiming them, the world’s chief deliberative body intended to combat disease, hunger, genocide, racism, war, and other prob­lems of that magnitude. How could a key term in its proclamation—­‘ dignity’—­become an occasion for comedy? In part, b ­ ecause this was a prominent case of a common failing—­a pronouncement that overdrew its moral accounts by asserting the rights of “the h ­ uman f­ amily.” ­Family? The “Declaration” was a­ dopted three years ­a fter the bombing of Hiroshima. But “­family” ­here was a h ope, aspiring to a w orthy ideal. And politics, not to speak of international politics, demanded the leaky writing by committee that produced the “Declaration”—­which had no author, only “draf­ters,” and none of them was Thomas Jeff erson. Is it mean-­spirited to complain about bathos in the UN “Declaration”? Mocking it would be worse. Yet mockery we have always with us. In the crucial (for Pico) year of 1948, when the “Declaration” was made official, Evelyn Waugh published ἀ e Loved One: An Anglo-­American Tragedy, his savage parody of the American funeral industry. Vile Bodies had been his breakout book in 1930. Jessica Mitford (Waugh had pursued her ­sister) followed ἀ e Loved One with ἀ e American Way of Death. What Waugh had done as a novelist, she did again as a reporter in 1963, tallying data about burying the dead in North Amer­i­ca. One datum was a meeting or­ga­nized “to upgrade the standard of ­dying,” as Mitford puts it, by the Society of American Florists. The Society’s stake in the funeral business was large. To protect it, a Symposium on Sentiment was convened, and the assembled florists heard a Statement on Memorialization, which, in Mitford’s description, “had quite a lot to say about the Dignity of Man, the United States as champion of freedom and leader of the demo­cratic nations of the world, the importance of the individual, the profound traditions of the centuries and so on.”117 Mitford could have written the UN’s “Declaration.” The statement that she reported from the undertakers declares that “final rites, memorial tributes, the hallowed pageant of the funeral ser­vice all speak for the dignity of man. . . . ​Memorialization is love . . . ​[that] can never die. It is the recognition of the immortality of the h ­ uman spirit, the rightful reverence earned by the good life. It is the final testimony to the dignity of man.”118 Comedy cannot deflate what has not been inflated. What put air in the balloon of

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the ‘dignity of man’? How had that sonorous phrase become an incitement to ridicule by the ­middle of the last ­century? Part of the story was politics as usual, as in the UN’s “Universal Declaration.” A smaller part was the boosting of Pico della Mirandola as the herald of modern h ­ uman dignity. The collection of Re­nais­sance texts that still disseminates his speech to American college students also came out in 1948.119 ­Going on seventy years ­later, Pico thrives: a Wikipedia site advertises his Oration as the “Manifesto of the Re­nais­sance” and a “key text of Re­nais­ sance humanism.” The adulation echoes long-­playing praises like ­those urged by a prize-­winning book, ἀ e Idea of the Re­nais­sance, where a w ­ hole chapter goes to “Pico della Mirandola and Re­nais­sance Ambition.” The authors try to capture the Oration in an arpeggio of extrapolations from it, noting that the speech is “often . . . ​taken to be constitutive of the Re­nais­ sance as a period” and that it “divulged the self-­conceived dignity of Re­nais­sance man.” Pico’s words, unpublished by him and prefacing a canceled debate, are his “definitive testament, and its traditional place in Re­nais­sance studies seems . . . ​appropriate.”120 Why make so much, in such ­grand language, of a failed speech? Why idolize its author—­claiming, for example, that at the end of the eigh­teenth ­century the “structure of the Piconian moment . . . ​reappeared in Kant’s mathematical sublime: an apprehension of the majesty of the illimitable, . . . ​producing a r estless aspiration similar to that of Pico’s Adam”? Alas: Kant was more responsible for our ­mistakes about Pico than Pico was for Kant’s idea of the sublime. Such misunderstandings of history and philosophy are easier to correct than the bad prose that propagates them—­ though just such correcting is an aim of comedy like Mitford’s. Mockery like hers might make bathos too risky. But writing about dignity—­ especially with Pico on stage—is a festival of bathos.121 Classicism, where the roots of bathos sank deep in ancient soil, lives on—in the Classical Dictionary of Proper Names by John Lemprière, for example. Still in print, this reference book was first published before the French Revolution, and a more recent edition looks even farther back to Pico’s age and the “classical myth and legend in Re­nais­sance dictionaries.” Pedigree aside, Lemprière meant his book for practical use—on many topics, including names of the ancient dead. ­Under the letter B we find Berenice, whose golden hair enticed Jupiter to steal it; Brutus, who avenged the virginal Lucretia; and Burrus, “a chief of the praetorian guards put to death by Nero.” Does a newborn need dignifying by an ancient name?



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Lemprière off ers a dazzling “Berenice,” a crafty “Brutus,” a resolute “Burrus,” and hundreds more.122 Despite what the Dictionary says about “Burrus,” ­whether a S extus Afranius Burrhus was killed by Nero is unclear. A certainty is that the emperor forced another advisor, the phi­los­o­pher Seneca, to kill himself, turning the Stoic sage into a Roman Socrates. The phi­los­o­pher and the soldier Burrhus tried to keep Nero in line and Rome on track ­until they both failed and died, leaving their names and deeds to historians, poets, and playwrights—­like Racine. In the ­middle of Racine’s Britannicus, Burrhus tells himself that savagery is his student’s real genius: “At last, Burrhus, Nero finds his talent: the ferocity that you thought pliable is soon to be freed from your feeble bonds.” An earnest teacher d ­ oing his best: that’s the good news about Burrhus. But his lessons failed—­disappointing, if not tragic. In that case, why name a child Burrhus? Making this se­lection from Lemprière’s off erings—­like picking the wrong Brutus or one of several Berenices—­might invite trou­ble.123 Yet Burrhus was the name chosen in 1904 by the parents of B. F. Skinner, ­later always just ‘B. F.’ His parents had ­family reasons for the naming, to honor the child’s ­mother, born Grace Burrhus, and her ­father—­B. F.’s “grand­father Burrhus.” The name was “troublesome,” Skinner complained, ­because it had to be “spelled out and explained. The spelling may have been ­adopted at a t ime when it was fash­ion­able to Latinize North Eu­ro­pean names.” Bearing this burden of nomenclature, Latinate and classical, Skinner still took to Latin in high school: “I rather liked Virgil and dug into it,” digging deep enough to give a speech in Latin when he graduated from Hamilton College, ­after studying Greek as well. Even if B. F. had hated the classics, however, he was stuck with a noble Roman name, no ­matter which ‘Burrhus’ his parents w ­ ere thinking of.124 He had a chance to reconnect with this learned heritage when he went back to lit­er­a­ture ­after World War  II. His BA had been in En­glish. He planned to go to Greenwich Village and write but found that he lacked the talent. So he switched to psy­chol­ogy in 1928, enrolling as a gradu­ate student at Harvard. When Harvard called him back twenty years ­later, he returned as a famous scientist but also as the author of a brand new novel, Walden Two—­still in print like ἀ e Loved One. The novel’s narrator and protagonist is a professor of psy­chol­ogy. “I did not need a g­ reat deal of imagination,” Skinner confessed. “Much of the life in Walden Two was my own at the time.” The psychologist’s name is Burris, echoing the classics willy-­nilly.125

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T ­ oday Walden Two sells better than Waugh’s book about death in Hollywood, also published in 1948. With his contrived plot, flat characters, and wooden dialogue, Burrhus Skinner has outdone Waugh not as a novelist but as a p olemicist and propagandist. Skinner is the Ayn Rand of behaviorism.126 Writing in the American Scientist, Stephen Ledoux, a “ professor of behaviorology,” identified Skinner’s ­grand theory as a “philosophy of science,” tracing it to work done by John  B. Watson early in the previous ­century. The same issue of the magazine reprinted an article by Skinner, “The Experimental Analy­sis of Be­hav­ior,” that ran originally in 1957, promoting it as an “American Scientist Centennial Classic.” This article—­ certainly a scientific classic—­gives an accessible summary of the technical side of Skinner’s “science of be­hav­ior.” Walden Two was his attempt to make smooth propaganda for the same science. In 1971 his Beyond Freedom and Dignity restated the propaganda, frontally and less smoothly: its sales figures lag Walden Two.127 A pivotal scene comes near the end of the novel. Burris—­after endless badgering by ­Castle, an impregnable philosopher—­fi­nally decides to sign up for the behaviorist utopia pushed at him by his assailant. Burris has been provoked by a newspaper headline: dignit y of ma n, bac c a l aur eat e a ddr ess t heme. This is the title of a c ommencement speech to be given by the president of his own university. He has heard the rhe­toric before, remembering phrases like ‘restoring the dignity of the h ­ uman soul’ . . . ​packed tightly together. As usual, I was not sure what any of t­ hese utterances meant. . . . ​ They seemed to refer to worth-­while goals. But . . . ​it was obvious that no one, least of all the speaker, had any notion of how to . . . ​attain them. As a t eacher, . . . ​I saw that this could not go on. . . . ​W hat was needed was a new conception of man, compatible with our scientific knowledge. . . . ​Nothing short of the complete revision of a c ulture would suffice. . . . ​Only one course of action lay before me. . . . ​I knew what I was ­going to do.

Skinner read graduation speeches to find “mentalistic expressions” and collected them in a notebook for “translation into be­hav­ior.” He tested this procedure with samples from La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims and looked for Latin etymologies of words that “obscured the social conditions responsible for current prob­lems.” But the main road to his brave new world



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bypassed philology and ran through his laboratory. The first steps ­were to synthesize his research and make a plan that could be taken more seriously than the fiction of Walden Two. This was the task of Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner’s behaviorist manifesto, which made the cover of Time in 1971 with an ominous headline: we ­c a n’t a f f or d f r eedom.128 Writing for a freedom-­loving public in the chill of the Cold War, Skinner saw science and technology as humanity’s best hopes in a t ime of peril. Despite pro­gress in the physical and life sciences, however, the science of man was not yet good enough to support the most needed technology—an engineering of be­hav­ior. Since Plato’s era, he complained, tradition had suppressed any such endeavor with false claims about h ­ uman agency, like calling a Burrhus ‘steadfast in spirit’ or a Seneca ‘wise at heart.’ Constant appeals across the centuries to thoughts, beliefs, feelings, acts of ­will, and other internalities ignored the facts of ­human be­hav­ior. The ‘inner man’ who is the sum of ­those internalities, in the usual story, “is autonomous—­and, so far as a science of be­hav­ior is concerned, that means miraculous.”129 The Hermetic Asclepius, quoted by Pico to open his Oration, says that “man is a ­great miracle.” But wonderment was anathema to Skinner. He called autonomy a miracle to exclude it from the science which, in his view, was the only solution to the “terrifying prob­lems that face us in the world ­today.” He had no use for miracles. Objects of scientific study had to be observable, like physical be­hav­ior in environmental and evolutionary settings. Science could observe be­hav­ior—­acts and tendencies to act—­only ­because all the evidence for them was on the outside. Science saw only the outer man. But tradition posited an inner man and attached the mysterious feature of autonomy to explain what the outer man was up to. Just as God made Adam in his image and likeness, so this “inner man has been created in the image of the outer.” Both creations w ­ ere fictions.130 The only real­ity was scientific, found through experiment by a science of be­hav­ior in order to underwrite a technology of be­hav­ior. A fundamental princi­ple was that every­t hing ­human happens in a physical environment whose power of se­lection operates on species through evolution, very slowly, and on individuals through conditioning, much faster. Confusions about autonomy, dignity, and value obscured this princi­ple. The false belief in freedom or autonomy appealed to an absurd idea—­uncaused be­hav­ior. Delusions about internality made dignity an inner object of praise and blame, when t­ here was no such inward item. Tradition—­ notably the classical tradition—­sustained both ­mistakes: “a tremendous

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weight of traditional ‘knowledge’ . . . ​must be corrected or displaced by a scientific analy­sis.”131 Meanwhile, worries about value multiplied as science advanced ­toward a better understanding of what an environment is. Who would decide which values ­were to govern a person’s responses to her environment? “Freedom and dignity,” in Skinner’s view, are “possessions of the autonomous man of traditional theory . . . ​in which a p erson is held responsible for his conduct and given credit for his achievements. A scientific analy­sis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment.”132 If the environment gets all the praise and all the blame, what becomes of sin, redemption, or saintliness? No blame for Nero? No praise for Burrhus? As hellish as the world may become, an environment is not the sort of ­t hing that can be sent to hell. ­A fter World War II, ­a fter Dachau and Nagasaki, that fact alone w ­ ill have ended the conversation with Skinner for many p ­ eople. On the other hand, he had an audience, not just fellow scientists but also a w orld that had witnessed and suff ered science’s powers of innovation and destruction. Radar, transistors, and the Apollo program came from the same global network of laboratories that made atom bombs. In his own laboratory, Skinner collected evidence for the theory outlined in the second chapter of Beyond Freedom and Dignity. The theory, in the simplified version that opens this chapter, explains how be­hav­ior relates to and acts on the environment that stimulates it: Stimulus S1 poison S2 jail S3 sword S4 food S5 sunburn S6 rain

Be­hav­ior B1 vomit B2 escape B3 fend off B4 eat B5 seek shade B6 find cover

Consequence C1 poisoning stops C2 confinement ends C3 harm prevented C4 hunger satisfied C5 pain avoided C6 annoyance avoided

The environment that always stimulates also always selects, by evolution over the ages or by conditioning—­sometimes rapidly. Some be­hav­iors, like B1, are hardwired; they are automatic responses to stimuli like S1. Other be­hav­iors, like B2–6, are more complex and not automatic. But B1–6 are all be­hav­iors that help the behaving organism, which is why the environment



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selects them: they have good consequences, C1–6. A s timulus like S4 is called a ‘reinforcer’ of B4 ­because it makes B4 and then C4 likelier to happen again, meaning that B4 is reinforced—­a ll of which can be observed empirically, mea­sured in time, and evaluated by probabilities. Reinforcers can be positive like S4 or negative like S5 and S6, which are called ‘aversive.’ B2–6, made recurrent by C2–6, are called ‘operant’ be­hav­iors to distinguish them from ­others, like B1, that are merely reflexive and do not ‘operate’ on the environment. The dynamic system of interactions (including feedback) among S2–6, B2–6, and C2-­C6 is called ‘operant conditioning,’ a k ind of learning that works through consequences that follow be­hav­iors that follow environmental stimuli.133 Someone without the sense to come in out of the rain is not a candidate for operant conditioning by repetitions of S6: this seems obvious. But Skinner ­will object ­because the ‘sense’ deemed to be lacking is an unobservable faculty of the inner person whom he banishes from the science and technology of be­hav­ior. Skinner notes that this m ­ istake about internal agency is hard to correct in cases of aversive reinforcement like prison, torture, and execution. The awful history of politics, the long annals of cruelty, convince us that t­ hose who resist the misery are heroes of ­will. We memorialize their be­hav­ior as a “strug­gle for freedom,” creating a “lit­er­a­ ture of freedom” to preserve and broadcast our misunderstanding of the be­hav­ior involved.134 Skinner treated this lit­er­a­ture as misleading but real and physical—­part of the environment and therefore eff ective. It is speech transmitted as sound or words printed on paper. “Designed to induce ­people to act to ­free themselves from vari­ous kinds of intentional control, [it] does not impart a philosophy of freedom; it induces ­people to act.” This lit­er­a­ture is a physical conduit of aversive control, not a philosophy to counsel and console victims of politics by improving their minds and soothing their spirits: ­there are no minds, as far as science is concerned. Nonetheless, even though its “­simple objective status” goes undetected, the very real lit­er­a­ ture of freedom has historical consequences: dictators fall and empires collapse. Concrete events sustain the illusion that freedom is a feeling or a state of mind.135 Appeals to internal agency are less eff ective, however, when reinforcement is nonaversive, coming not from negative but from positive reinforcers that are less con­spic­u­ous. Bread, circuses, and opium can be pleasant but still no less controlling than prison cells, waterboards, and firing

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squads. A t hief’s pistol is a t ool of aversive control. A r oulette wheel is nonaversive. Both devices make it likelier that money w ­ ill change hands. But ­these facts are obscured by “the lit­er­a­ture of freedom [that] has never come to grips with techniques of control which do not generate escape or counterattack b ­ ecause it has dealt with the prob­lem in terms of states of mind and feelings. . . . ​Freedom is a ­matter of contingencies of reinforcement, not of the feelings the contingencies generate. . . . ​It is said that even though be­hav­ior is completely determined, it is better that a man ‘feel ­free’ or ‘believe that he is ­free.’ ” Although Rousseau was naive about the good ­will of educators, says Skinner, even he remarked that “­there is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom, for in that way one captures volition itself.”136 Another ­mistake made by the lit­er­a­ture of freedom, according to Skinner, was to oppose all control: Control is clearly the opposite of freedom, and if freedom is good, control must be bad. What is overlooked is control which does not have aversive consequences. . . . ​The prob­lem is to ­free men, not from control, but from certain kinds of control. . . . ​­Were it not for the unwarranted generalization that all control is wrong, we should deal with the social environment as simply as we deal with the nonsocial. . . . ​We accept the fact that we depend upon the world around us, and we simply change the nature of the de­pen­dency. In the same way, to make the social environment as ­free as pos­si­ble of aversive stimuli, we do not need to destroy that environment or escape from it: we need to redesign it.

Is the natu­ral (“nonsocial”) environment ­simple to deal with? Do gains made by removing aversive stimuli from the social environment amount to freedom? Is a te chnology of control and de­pen­dency something one should want to engineer? The questions begged in Skinner’s book are casualties of the genre: utopian polemic. And Skinner’s polemic was eff ective. Time magazine got the message: we ­c a n’t a f f or d f r eedom.137 Convinced that punishment, blame, and other aversive consequences of be­hav­ior had produced a lit­er­a­ture of freedom, Skinner also described a lit­er­a­ture of dignity that spoke to positive consequences, like rewards and praise. He saw dignity as something like credit, such that we get none at all for vomiting poison and l­ ittle for coming in out of the rain or ­running from a burning building. Suppose the fire was arson, a capital crime: the operant conditioning was perpetrated by a felon who stands to be severely



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punished, and yet the fleeing victim gets l­ ittle applause, by Skinner’s calculus, just ­because the aversive control was con­spic­u­ous—­a blazing building. Since the same goes for positive stimuli, like blatant flattery, the general rule was that we give and get more credit for be­hav­iors whose reinforcers are less obvious.138 Dignity was like credit, then, but not exactly. The telling diff erence was admiration: “­There is something more than . . . ​the appropriate evaluation of reinforcers in our concern for dignity or worth. We not only praise, commend, approve or applaud a person. . . . ​We stand in awe . . . ​and admire be­hav­ior more as we understand it less . . . ​[in] what we attribute to autonomous man. A diff erence between expressing admiration and giving credit is clear when we admire be­hav­ior which admiration ­will not aff ect.” Skinner treated admiration as passive, an eff ect of external ­causes on the admiring subject. If someone admired a display of heraldry or other trappings of noble birth, for example, this was not b ­ ecause admiration would alter the institution of aristocracy: no amount of admiring or scorning would, by itself, shrink or expand the nobility’s claim to dignity by birthright. But t­ here was a lit­er­a­ture to keep track of such t­ hings. Just like the lit­er­a­ture of freedom, this equally misleading lit­er­a­ture of dignity focused more on re­sis­tance than on mere evasion, and the object of re­sis­tance was withholding of credit seen as unjust. Depriving someone of due credit removed a positive reinforcer and made the situation aversive: this was the right analy­sis. The wrong analy­sis, propagated by misleading talk about dignity, claimed that an inner man’s autonomy and personhood had been injured.139 Skinner’s special concern was “that part of the lit­er­a­ture of dignity which protests encroachment on personal worth.” While our traditions about freedom generally mean to diminish pain, danger, and other “aversive features of daily life, . . . ​a concern for personal worth sometimes triumphs over freedom from aversive stimulation.” The inner man who heeds traditions about dignity could choose death over dishonor. But science could not explain such a choice or justify it by invoking dignity. “Science naturally seeks a f uller explanation,” Skinner insisted, b ­ ecause “its goal is the destruction of mystery. The defenders of dignity ­w ill protest,” and “the lit­er­a­ture of dignity . . . ​stands in the way of further ­human achievements.”140 ­After repudiating dignity, freedom, and the lit­er­a­tures that promoted them, Skinner spent the rest of his book on punishment, values, and culture,

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leading to a final question: “What is Man?” Along the way, the blasting at traditional notions of freedom and dignity never ­stopped: Defenders of freedom and dignity . . . ​block pro­gress ­toward a more eff ective technology of be­hav­ior. The strug­gle for freedom and dignity has been formulated as a defense of autonomous man rather than as . . . ​a technology of be­hav­ior . . . ​ which would more successfully reduce the aversive consequences of be­hav­ior. What is being abolished is autonomous man, . . . ​t he man defended by the lit­er­a­tures of freedom and dignity. His abolition has long been overdue. . . . ​To man qua man we readily say good riddance.141

The quotable rant made Skinner more famous but also despised at a time when what he deplored had many defenders—­artists, journalists, politicians, and professors, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Anthony Burgess, Noam Chomsky, and even Spiro Agnew. Meanwhile, when a “Humanist of the Year” award came from the American Humanist Association, he acknowledged that “many p ­ eople objected to my nomination.” The prize had already gone to Margaret Sanger, Linus Pauling, and Benjamin Spock, but Skinner felt compromised ­because his new book parted ways with secularism as the Association saw it. “I had been a contributing member . . . ​for many years,” he recalled, but “if Humanism meant nothing more than the maximizing of personal freedom and dignity, then I was not a Humanist.” In fact, when he joined the Association, the term ‘dignity’ did not appear in its manifesto. But while defending Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he worried about the “aggrandizement of the individual in much Humanist writing.” As a member of the organ­ization, he may have known that a new manifesto would soon announce the “preciousness and dignity of the individual person” as a “central humanist value,” while also declaring that “possibilities of individual freedom of choice exist in ­human life and should be increased” even though “science can account for the c­ auses of be­hav­ior.” Prelates of his atheist church now accused Skinner of heresy.142 Critics of behaviorism rallied not just to h ­ uman dignity but also to traditions that Skinner called “lit­er­a­tures.” At their heart some saw a humanism revived in the Re­nais­sance, which they could read about in ἀe Re­nais­ sance Philosophy of Man with its En­glish version of Pico’s Oration. But



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sometimes the dignity drowned in blather, prompting ­others—­like Jessica Mitford—to make fun of it. For that to happen, the high-­minded ‘dignity’ had to become trite, dancing at the edge of bathos in Skinner’s “lit­er­a­ture of dignity.” Eugenio Garin, Martin Heidegger, and Jean Paul Sartre ­were masters of that elevated lit­er­a­ture, where Pico stood tall—­thanks to them and to ­others discussed ­later in this book.143 When Skinner attacked the lit­er­a­ture of dignity, he was not joking like Mitford. His seriousness impressed the editors of Time who put him on their magazine’s cover, declaring his readiness to dispense with freedom— as commonly understood—­a long with dignity. Nonetheless, though beyond freedom and dignity was where Skinner wanted to go, half a ­century has passed and we are not yet t­ here, w ­ hether this destination is over the rainbow of the ridicu­lous or the sublime or both. Dignity is still a battleground. Writing for the New Republic on “The Stupidity of Dignity,” Steven Pinker—­like Skinner, a Harvard professor—­ attacked a report on ­Human Dignity and Bioethics commissioned by the second President Bush to examine ge­ne­t ic and other innovations in biomedicine. “Anyone is likely to have a ‘yuck’ response when contemplating unpre­ce­dented manipulations of our biology,” Pinker conceded, adding that the President’s Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of ‘dignity’ a r ubric for expounding on it. This collection of essays is the culmination of a long eff ort by the Council to place dignity at the center of bioethics. The general feeling is that, even if a new technology would improve life and health and decrease suff ering and waste, it might have to be rejected, or even outlawed, if it aff ronted ­human dignity. What­ever that is. The prob­lem is that ‘dignity’ is a s quishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it.

Not every­one agrees. Reviewing ἀ e Better Angels of Our Nature, a book by Pinker about vio­lence, Jeremy Waldron—­a phi­los­o­pher and l­ awyer—­complained that the New Republic article “dismisses ‘­human dignity’ ” as a “squishy subjective notion.” Waldron added that the Better Angels book pays l­ ittle attention to ­human dignity. . . . ​But surely it must be one of the ideas that lies b ­ ehind our concerns to limit vio­lence and that would, if

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dig n i t y Pinker is right in his basic thesis, motivate our cele­bration of the decline in vio­lence. If he is right, more p ­ eople can now live more dignified lives, ­free of the misery and degradation associated with war, murder, torture, and destruction. We must hope and pray that dignity is not one of the ­t hings that has been tossed over the rail of “the escalator of reason” in the course of the rational reconstruction of morality that has brought us to where we are.

And ­here we are—­well short of moving beyond freedom and dignity. Where we have already traveled with that idea has much to do with Pico and his Oration.144

t wo

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pa r t

stories about pico

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Pico Dignified ­These Italians knew the facts. —­b ur c k har d t

1. ​Swiss Facts about Italy Since the turn of the millennium, the British Library has cata­logued several dozen titles about Jacob Burckhardt or by him—­the latest items in a large lit­er­a­ture, including a s even-­volume biography, that describes his writings, their influence, and the author himself, who was born in 1818. He left only a few scattered sentences about Pico. But he left them in a power­ ful book that fixed the prince in modern memory as a “humanist” who— as much as or more than Alberti or Cesare Borgia or Benvenuto Cellini—­ shaped the first moments of modernity.1 To name this era, Burckhardt borrowed the word re­nais­sance or ‘rebirth’ from Jules Michelet, a po­liti­cally engaged French historian who, with some irony, called the term “pleasant” and applied it to his own nation’s achievements in the sixteenth ­century—­after two French kings invaded Italy. Burckhardt, who was Swiss, focused on the Italian ­century prior to ­those calamities, but not to tell a pleasant story. In his eyes, Italy’s birthing of modernity was bloody and, in the end, a moral failure. Notable Italians—­ some with astonishing gifts of mind, w ­ ill, and body—­carried a d isease: unchecked individualism was Burckhardt’s diagnosis. One ailing genius who attracted his attention was Pico, a prince bold enough to defend “­free ­will” and the “dignity of man.” Burckhardt’s Culture of the Re­nais­sance in Italy announced this assessment in 1860, and the book’s success eventually spread it around the globe.2 71

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Georg Voigt—­like Michelet a h istorian but closer to Burckhardt’s generation—­was another student of cultural revival, specifically the “rebirth (Wiedergeburt) of classical antiquity,” which he located in Italy ­after the M ­ iddle Ages. In 1859 this careful Prus­sian scholar described Petrarch, an Italian, as the creator of a transformative “pro­cess of cultural history”—­the “penetration into intellectual life” of the classics. Humanismus, the resulting attitude and movement, matured in Italy, especially in Florence, as Voigt told the tale in his Revival of Classical Antiquity or the First C ­ entury of Humanism: he concluded that humanism’s greatest patrons ­were Cosimo de’ Medici and his heirs—­close friends of Pico. But ­there was nothing about Pico in Voigt’s story. A much expanded edition of 1880 also left him out: the prince’s absence from the original version was no oversight. Pico was missing again in 1905 when an Italian expert, Remigio Sabbadini, approached the same topic on a na rrower path in Discoveries of Latin and Greek Manuscripts in the 14th and 15th Centuries. The specialist title suggests a reason for Pico’s absence. The umanismo studied by Sabbadini and Voigt was not filosofia but classicismo—­either philology itself or inseparable from it. And yet, by their lights why did the famously learned Pico not qualify, even in a small way, as one of the illustri umanisti italiani? Although the core of his proj­ect was philosophical, not philological, Pico relied on breakthroughs by Ermolao Barbaro, Ambrogio Traversari, and ­others whose classicism impressed Voigt and Sabbadini.3 In 1905, however, the prince was not as vis­i­ble—­even in Sabbadini’s Italy—as he would be a­ fter World War I. Burckhardt’s book had been read in Italian since 1876, but few Italians at that time thought of Pico’s age as golden. Some, agreeing with Burckhardt, saw moral degeneracy and, from their own nationalist perspective, po­liti­cal disaster. Almost no one centered the period on the Quattrocento. Th ­ ose who praised it w ­ ere often thinking of ­later innovations by Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, and Bernardino Telesio, seen as precursors of Descartes, Galileo, and Spinoza. The usual Italian name for this era was the Resurgence (risorgimento), not the Re­nais­sance (rinascimento, rinascita, rinascenza). Its bound­aries ­were often put at Leo X’s rise to the papacy in 1513 and Campanella’s death in 1639, long a­ fter Pico died.4 Time had to pass before Burckhardt’s new picture of postmedieval Italy seemed au­then­tic to Italians. With its French name, this pa­norama in German of peninsular culture created by a Swiss art historian was not a pen-



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insular product—at a time when Italy gloried in her new national identity. Moreover, Burckhardt’s philosophical background was also foreign—­ Kantian and Hegelian. In 1860, Italian thinkers had only begun to ingest ­these dense systems from the Protestant north. Eventually they would discover what Burckhardt had also found ­there—­hints for a p ower­ful new portrait of Pico preserved in reference works, like Wilhelm Tennemann’s, which ­were vehicles of the new German philosophies.5 It was culture, however, not philosophy, that Burckhardt claimed as his subject. His book is a cultural history, a genre known to Voigt and many ­others yet transformed by Burckhardt. Erudition like Voigt’s or Sabbadini’s was no match for his eloquence, which many still find captivating. He pointedly called his book an ‘essay,’ and it is not a history in any ordinary way. Its structure is thematic, not chronological, in six chapters whose themes are hard to pin down: po­liti­cal action; individual agency; reviving antiquity; making discoveries; social be­hav­ior; and then morality and religion. Any such labels ­will be too abstract. But they set scenes for the prince’s brief appearances in the book, amid countless particulars that have kept its pages breathing—­and Pico alive in them.6 Burckhardt started his story with politics. Centuries before, when Eu­rope’s princes had to contend with popes and emperors, Italy was already an exceptional place—­more enriched by commerce, less constrained by feudalism. As the two ­g reat powers fought ­t here and elsewhere for supremacy, conditions in Italy bred “a host of po­liti­cal forms—­ towns and tyrants—­some already in being, ­others rising anew, their existence purely a m ­ atter of fact. In them for the first time appears the spirit of the modern Eu­ro­pean state, ­f ree to indulge its impulses; often enough they display unrestrained selfishness of the most horrific kind, mocking ­every right, uprooting ­every sprout of healthy culture. But where this tendency is overcome or at least off set, a new vitality enters history: the state as a calculated, conscious creation, as a work of art. This new life takes a h undred shapes.” Some of ­t hese shapes give form to Burckhardt’s first chapter, the po­liti­cal basis of his cultural history. The chapter’s title, “The State as a Work of Art,” suggests an idea of Hegel’s that the phi­los­o­pher came to doubt: that a p ­ eople’s politics could attain and sustain the coherence of art. The most dazzling moments of w ­ ill and design that Burckhardt observed in Italy w ­ ere shocking, not at all orderly or serene—­u nlikely settings for ideals of dignity and grace that phi­los­o­ phers preached about.

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The states in question ­were despotisms and republics, secular and ecclesiastical, native and foreign, large and small—­early and late arrivals on the scene of warfare and diplomacy. Some w ­ ere ruled by “lords of vio­lence (Gewaltherrscher)” who w ­ ere ready to use force, oppose the lawful order, and pursue their own interests. Both objectivity and subjectivity guided the combatants: they ­were calculating, dispassionate, exacting, expedient, reflective, self-­conscious, and systematic. Concentration, precision, rationality, and realism made them eff ective—­but not good. Overturning custom and tradition for their own ends, they released a w ­ hole society from old ties and habits. Their motives ­were selfish, but the results ­were sometimes egalitarian and demo­cratizing: ­these violent p ­ eople ­were self-­interested 7 individualists. As politics turned objective in Italy, politicians became more alert to their own subjective agency, their individuality, which had been masked in the M ­ iddle Ages when two sides of consciousness—­one directed outward to the world, the other inward to man himself—­dreamed or dozed ­under the same veil. The veil was woven of faith, delusion and childish timidity, causing the world and history to be viewed as if painted in colors of won­der. Man knew himself only as race, ­people, party, corporation or some other form of the universal. It was in Italy that this veil first drifted off into the air as ­people awoke to an objective examination and treatment of the state and of all ­t hings in this world. But at the same time the subjective ­rose up in full strength. Man became a spiritual individual and knew himself as such . . . ​, in the strongest sense b ­ ecause of po­liti­cal conditions. Much e­ arlier one already sees sporadic development of the self-­ regulated personality; . . . ​by the end of the thirteenth ­century, however, Italy starts to swarm with personalities; the ban imposed on individualism is completely broken; a t housand distinctive characters are unleashed to find their special roles.

Pico was such a c haracter, like other individuals known from poems that Dante wrote in the early 1300s, creating models for ‘universal men’ of the next centuries—­l ike Alberti and Leonardo. Even e­ arlier figures, including Dante himself and Petrarch, wanted an updated fame—­ secular as well as eternal glory, both local and universal, not just to emulate the past and hope for a blissful afterlife but to relish the h ­ ere and now. In this way, immortality became a cultural as well as a



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religious good; at best, in Burckhardt’s view, the wish to live forever through mere celebrity was a profane ambition, at worst demonic. But wit and satire w ­ ere art’s correctives for fame as a ­career, making celebrities the victims of their excesses. The notion of publicity was now plausible, as self-­promotion or self-­defense. In art as in morals, the “development of the individual” was far from an unmixed good, as Burckhardt showed in his second chapter.8 Opening his long third chapter on the “reawakening of antiquity,” Burckhardt (unlike Voigt) maintained that reviving ancient culture was not enough to produce a rebirth of the spirit. Out of historical necessity, however, with or without help from intellectuals, some such re­nais­sance would have caught fire from the energetic Italian ­people. Scholars had studied antiquity before—in the eighth ­century and again in the twelfth. But only ­later, in Petrarch’s day, did a ­whole ­people turn to ancient wisdom when memories of Roman greatness quickened civic consciousness. The sight of ancient ruins excited antiquarians and patriots—­sometimes the same persons. The richest antique remains ­were textual, however, read in the new libraries of Florence, Rome, and Venice. Brokers of the commerce with antiquity ­were the scholars whom Burckhardt called ‘humanists.’ Some w ­ ere f­ ree of the clerical obligations that tied medieval thinkers to religious dogma, church policy, and monkish rules of be­hav­ior. Humanists lived on personal talent—­cultural talent that fed on the po­liti­cal ­will of patrons and overlords. ­Careers open to talent ­were meritocratic in princi­ple, also usually elitist in purpose and results. Typical products w ­ ere Latin histories, letters, plays, poems, sermons, speeches, and treatises, all loaded with learning or stiff with it. Invective was a specialty, whose authors poisoned each other with phrases. Seduced by pagan gaiety and chasing the banner of fame, they ­were tired of Christian godliness.9 In Burckhardt’s telling, classicism s­ haped the Re­nais­sance but did not cause it. Some read Cicero and Livy to discover new territories within themselves, while o ­ thers sought distant horizons of empire and science. ­These explorations w ­ ere the “Discovery of the World and of Man” that Michelet had already noticed in his own Re­nais­sance. In his fourth chapter, Burckhardt let Leonardo speak for two types of creativity: scientific observation and artistic repre­sen­ta­tion; discovery of the object and expression by the subject. P ­ eople, once politics turned them into individuals, could scrutinize both the self and the other. They gained perspective by

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recovering antiquity and responded to incentives from worlds newly explored. Some discoveries ­were astounding, like ­those by Columbus, as landscapes, mountains, and sunsets newly seen as aesthetic objects entered the ordinary repertoire of pleasures. Physicians and artists found fresh value in exact observations of ordinary ­things—­including ­human bodies in action. Scenes of daily life attracted poets before paint­ers started to depict them. As town and country came closer together, a more realistic lit­er­a­ture of peasant life treated its subjects with re­spect. ­Doing so was easier in Italy ­because diff erences of birth mattered less t­ here than elsewhere: a consequence was to observe h ­ uman be­hav­ior more carefully.10 The decline of nobility as a moral ideal and the rise of social equality ­were Burckhardt’s findings when he opened his fifth chapter, “Sociability and Cele­brations.” Talent, wealth, and education displaced birth, f­ amily, and rank as sources of social energy. Style rather than blood made the courtier perfect. The simultaneous obsession with titles, jousts, and other remnants of chivalry was superficial—­a nostalgic diversion from the real task of making society a work of art. Art is artifice, however, and designs for society made life itself artificial: comfort eased into luxury; style crystallized as vanity. Still, recognizing the dilettante as a cultural type implied wider access to the experience of elegance—­including vicarious access for a public ready to belittle amateurs who got it wrong. Life as art in the ser­vice of a prince expressed an elegant and arduous ideal of politics. Burckhardt—­never naive about politics or ­people—­nonetheless claimed that upper-­class ­women in the Re­nais­sance ­were equals of men, while taking it for granted that w ­ omen need not have applied for real ­careers, even in lit­er­a­ture. Among ­people of all classes, so he said, mutually ­free access to one another was a power­ful force for artistry in civic and creative life.11 Morals and religion w ­ ere his topics in the sixth, last, and longest chapter of his book. Like the inventors of his genre, Plutarch and Montaigne, Burckhardt was a moralizing essayist, but he opened this concluding section by disclaiming moral judgment. Morality is hard to assess, he insisted, and no moral theory could have changed Italy’s course or could have kept the Italian ­people from making their world modern. But this final chapter, like the w ­ hole book, is full of moral judgments, mostly negative: the author’s eyes w ­ ere on barbarism, corruption, crime, cruelty, and other ethical spectacles that destroyed his Re­nais­sance at its



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peak. The collapse came in the early sixteenth c­ entury when self-­ constructed personalities fi­nally ­violated too many bound­aries of faith and ethics. Turning to a c orrupt Church for moral guidance became a joke. When scholars admired pagan sages more than Christian martyrs, they unmoored a n ewly profane culture from sacred ideals. Once faith, hope, and love—­theological virtues for a community of saints—­were lost to them, the new individualists fell back on the noble sentiment of honor, “an enigmatic mixture of conscience and egotism.” Honor was a reed broken in tornadoes of selfishness spinning all across Italy.12 Burckhardt tracked the moral storms that energized the Re­nais­sance and then wrecked it—­most acutely by analyzing the vendetta. Individuals pressed their faculties of w ­ ill and mind to the limit—­and beyond limits of community, custom, and law. Imagination was also exploited, and it produced splendid art. But imagination counted for destruction in the calculus of desire. A w rong was done, a ­will thwarted. The wrong passed, but imagination and memory kept the ­will impaled on its pain, stuck on ­every hurtful event, picking e­ very last fruit from a poison tree. Vengeance—no longer the Lord’s—­was the demon at each individual’s throat: especially la bella vendetta, retribution as a work of art, a sly theft that stole satisfaction from an outwitted e­ nemy. No revenge was too terrible, no savagery, no deceit. Crime itself was a study and a delight. For the bella vendetta every­thing was permitted, without hy­poc­risy, in a perversion of the ideal that François Rabelais proposed for worldly monks: do what you ­will. The provocation was usually sensual, an off ense against a ­woman: ­daughter, m ­ other, wife. Objects of illicit desire inflamed imaginations, causing Re­nais­sance heroes to burn up their own talents. “The basic flaw,” Burckhardt concluded, seems also to be the basis of its greatness: developed individualism. Such a person first breaks ­free inwardly from the prevailing system of the state, usually tyrannical and illegitimate. . . . ​Seeing egotism victorious, he himself undertakes to defend the right in his own interest and by practicing vengeance falls prey to the dark powers, believing that he has restored inner peace. His love soon turns to another developed individualism, his neighbor’s wife. In the face of every­t hing objective—­ limits and laws of any kind—he holds fast to the feeling of his own sovereignty and makes up his mind in­de­pen­dently, as honor and advantage, shrewd deliberation and personal passion, forbearance and revenge

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s t o r i e s a bo u t p i c o converge in his inmost thoughts. Hence, if selfishness . . . ​is the root and stem of all evil, the Italians in their full development w ­ ere for this reason more acquainted with evil than other p ­ eoples. And yet this development of the individual . . . ​has been the higher framework in which Italians live. Neither good nor evil in itself, it is necessary, . . . ​a modern good and evil, a moral accounting very dif­fer­ent from what the ­Middle Ages knew. The Italian of the Re­nais­sance had to stand against the first tremendous tides of this new epoch. Through his life and passions, in all the heights and depths of this period, he became its most con­spic­u­ous and most characteristic type. Side by side with deep depravity developed the noblest harmony of personality and a glorious art that exalted individual life, as neither ancient nor medieval culture would or could have done.13

In religion, as in morals, individuals fashioned themselves at the edges of action and conviction. While Galeotto, Giovanni Pico’s b ­ rother, defied the Church to protect his f­ amily’s ­little stato, Savonarola subjected the Florentine state to religion. The friar’s personality empowered him to redirect the city’s cultural fervor, outraging its liberties, reducing education to a catechism, and using the classics to refute heretics. As the prophet of a failed theocracy, Savonarola stood for depleted religion in Burckhardt’s scheme, against culture and the state. The essayist found the preacher’s politics infantile, not ready for the world. And yet—­after Savonarola’s execution, as the monastic ideal sank deeper into disrepute—­Italy honored this volcanic friar, whom Burckhardt remembered as a ­great soul swallowed by a smaller mind. Italy, where cloisters and convents had become schools of scandal, “could find inspiration only in individuals.”14 Savonarola failed to build Jerusalem in Florence, and the Spirit that stirred up the German Reformation produced no such results in Italy. On the contrary, it was repression by a degenerate Rome that halted cultural development. Seeds of indiff erence or even contempt for religion sprouted in the soil of ecclesiastical tyranny and corruption. Piety was externalized, daily devotions neglected. Sacramental ritual seemed more magical than devout. As normal observances lost their hold, imaginative ­people turned to the abnormal—­the end-­time sermons and flagellant pro­cessions of revivalist preachers. “­These modern men”—as Burckhardt saw them—­“­were made completely subjective in religion, as in other m ­ atters, by their more potent



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individualism, and the g­ reat allure that they felt in discovering the outer and the spiritual worlds made them on the w ­ hole worldly.” Other threats to faith arose from Italy’s special situation: tolerance, from long experience of Byzantine and Muslim cultures; skepticism, from the teachings of the Greeks; fatalism, informed by “ancient, oriental, and medieval superstition” and, like the other new values, “mediated and in some ways muddled by the all-­powerful imagination.” Scholars, not immune to superstition, sometimes applied their skills on behalf of religion, but they ­were still self-­interested individuals. As critics of texts and language, they eroded the basis of faith in legend and custom. As writers of history, they replaced saintly virtue with secular fame. Burckhardt called them pagan and de­cadent. Erudition gave them access to ancient texts that confirmed magic and astrology. U ­ nder the spell of t­ hese dignified delusions, criticism succumbed to imagination despite “the strug­gle sustained by the clear Italian spirit as all this madness wove its web.” Cosimo and Lorenzo encouraged astrology by supporting Ficino. Borso d’Este covered the walls of his palace in Schifanoia with an astrological calendar. Fear of the stars in an unlucky time tormented the learned and the ignorant in 1494—­the year when Pico died. Some ridiculed the stargazers, but ­others propagated the mythologies that made gods of the stars. Popes, princes, and condottieri consulted their charts as fatalism weakened the Italian ­will and invited darker sins of magic. Demonology fed on scraps of Roman dissipation from which Iamblichus—­now in print and praised by the Platonic Acad­emy— had concocted his Egyptian mysteries. Clerics fabricated theories to support witchcraft t­ rials. Aeneas Sylvius, not yet a pope, described a sabbat, and Innocent VIII endorsed the Hammer of Witches. To ward off evil spirits, Florentine Platonists invoked better ones. “Dubious characters” like Agrippa von Nettesheim vulgarized this learned demonology, but demotic illusions held l­ ittle interest for Burckhardt.15 A more serious failing was that the same “system came complete with citations from the superstitions of antiquity, . . . ​leading even energetic and creative ­people of all classes to the magicians . . . ​and depriving them of belief . . . ​in a m oral world order.” In this climate, when Ficino made a horoscope for a Medici child, Italy felt the strain of cultural paradox, as “popu­lar and primitive” error emerged from refined scholarship. The hunt for witches grew into “a huge and hideous system.” But astrology was the most destructive superstition: its fatalism sapped h ­ uman resolve, eroding

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faith in providence and leading phi­los­o­phers to question the soul’s immortality. A ­ fter Ficino defended this Christian doctrine as a Platonist, Pomponazzi attacked it as an Aristotelian—­flagrant sectarian conflict.16 If Pomponazzi was right and phi­los­o­phers could give no assurance of an afterlife of rewards and punishments, what could motivate morality? If Machiavelli was right and Christian morals made the state weak, why should any ruler re­spect them? Lorenzo de’ Medici’s answer, according to Burckhardt, was a t heism or deism abstracted from bothersome dogmas for pragmatic purposes. An immanent God created a good world whose worldliness is good to experience, according to Lorenzo. Nature and God, humanity and divinity, interpenetrate; the individual soul unites with the infinite God in a ­great moral and physical cosmos. . . . ​W hile ­people of the ­Middle Ages see the world as a vale of tears, . . . ​­here, among the spirits of this chosen circle, arises the idea that God created the vis­i­ble world out of love by copying a m odel preexistent in him. . . . ​At first, by coming to know God, the individual soul can find him contracted within its narrow confines, but, by loving him, can also expand itself into the infinite—­and this is true bliss on earth. Undertones of medieval mysticism make contact ­here with the teachings of Platonism and with a s pecial modern spirit. ­Here, perhaps, ripened a p erfect fruit of that awareness of the world and of man that makes one call the Re­nais­sance in Italy alone the leader of our era of world history.

With this tribute to the cosmic piety of Lorenzo’s hymns, Burckhardt ended his essay.17 He thought that Italian cities, Florence especially, w ­ ere the “most impor­tant workshops of the modern Eu­ro­pean spirit,” the first to develop a modern politics—­rational, objective, calculated on individual interests. The thinkers who fashioned new moral and po­liti­cal theories no longer worked just as clergy. They valued secular experience as a cultural property dignified by classical pre­ce­dent, justifying inquiry into the natu­ral world and exploration of ­human life on earth. Public opinion, domestic order, enjoyment of the sensual, and comfort in its pleasures became respectable. Artistic production thrived, now that such attitudes—­sins in the ­Middle Ages—­were redeemed. The shift reached as far as standards of good and evil and norms of h ­ uman agency, now subjective and 18 individualist.



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Individualism, the basis of Italian modernity, is perplexing—­Burckhardt believed—­for modern morals. Individuals who form their own characters thrive in freedom. Personalities made stronger by talent and achievement earn admiration in cultural terms, loyalty in po­liti­cal terms. Virtuosos are rich in virtù and esteemed for autonomy. But virtuosity is risky, as Burckhardt showed in his account of Benvenuto Cellini. The goldsmith made perfect art only in the minor genre of decoration. Even his masterpiece, the Autobiography, suff ers from moral smallness. Nevertheless, “as a p erson Benvenuto ­will engage ­people ­until the end of time. It makes no diff erence that the reader constantly senses that he may be lying or boasting; the impression of a p owerfully energetic, completely perfected nature prevails. . . . ​He is a man who can do every­thing, risks every­thing and takes his mea­sure from himself. ­Whether we like it or not, in this figure lives a completely recognizable prototype of modern humanity.” To be f­ ree is to escape restraint. Style becomes manner, introspection breeds narcissism, asserting the self leads to exhibition. Fame decays into celebrity, public presence into publicity, public judgment is a noise in the street. The individual as subject becomes an ego. Yet this egotism, liberated by its illegitimacy from the discipline of ­family and community, makes a d isplay of what unrestrained talent can attain—­inviting ­others, what­ever their birth or position, to do the same. If individualism is a demonic power, it is also a force for democracy.19 Objectivity is also ambivalent; at its center stand individual subjects. Burckhardt admired them for mastering ­things in the natu­ral and ­human worlds by objectifying them—by holding them at a d istance in order to study, reshape, and manipulate, to make them into items of commerce, modes of conduct, facts of science, and works of art. The artist and the scientist make ­things into objects by observing them—to represent or to analyze. The merchant’s objects of calculation are ­things turned into wealth. To establish civility, parents and citizens make objects of their families and society.20 But power was Burckhardt’s main theater of objectification. Rationalized in public as war and diplomacy, power objectified was the state as a work of art. Manipulated secretly in the vendetta, calculated and cold-­ blooded, power was crime aspiring to the condition of art. Between revenge and war Burckhardt saw no sharp boundary. When Galeazzo Maria Sforza was murdered in Milan’s church of Santo Stefano in 1476, as he told the story, “no one meant to be at all irreverent. Galeazzo’s assassins prayed

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to the patron saint of the church in question and heard early mass ­t here before they struck.” Subjective agency was so absorbed in its own ruthless ­w ill that the object (Galeazzo) of vio­lence was completely exposed to calculated, concentrated power. The objectified victim was not only deprived of life but also detached from a s pace sanctified by the first Christian martyr—­a sanctuary selected for murder, not as sacrilege but as a secular crime. Galeazzo’s end was fated. Already in the reign of Filippo Maria, the Visconti duke whom Galeazzo’s ­father succeeded, “all the means and ends of the state had been concentrated on one ­thing, his personal safety,” secured only ­because the duke’s servants trusted one another less than they feared him. Franceso Sforza, the condottiere who followed Filippo Maria, reached new heights by a “ triumph of genius and individual strength.” In the twisted politics of the day, Francesco had his trou­bles—­intrigue, conspiracy, betrayal—­but he prospered by his native gifts. Even so, his wife murdered his mistress, though “his c­ hildren ­were as sweet as angels from heaven”—­until they w ­ ere “completely corrupted by unbounded egoism.” One was the doomed Galeazzo, a virtuoso of externalities. His beautiful hands, the high salaries that he paid, the extent of his line of credit, . . . ​t he celebrities who surrounded him, the armies and hunting-­birds that he supported ­were points of pride with him. He liked to hear himself talk, and he talked well enough—­most smoothly, perhaps, when he could off end an emissary from Venice. Now and then he had whims—­painting a room with figures in the course of a night, for example. ­There was also unreasoned debauchery and atrocious cruelty to ­t hose close to him. To a few ­people of wild imagination he seemed to have all the marks of a tyrant, so they did away with him and thereby delivered the state to one of his b ­ rothers, Lodovico il Moro, . . . ​whose character as prince was the most perfected of the age, or seemingly of nature itself, and so the notion of evil seems not entirely pertinent. Given the profound immorality of the means that he used, he seems altogether ingenuous about their application. In all likelihood it would have puzzled him deeply had someone tried to make him understand that moral responsibility exists not only for ends but for means as well.

The Sforzas made their state a work of art by remorseless exploitation—­ reducing every­one e­ lse to objects. What they, the Borgias, the Este, and



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other masters of vio­lence did in politics also had cultural (Cellini) and religious (Savonarola) dimensions. By t reating each other as objects, ­human agents constructed themselves as subjects—­personalities (condottieri, cortigiani, principi, profeti, virtuosi, uomini universali) as works of art. Up to a point, the self-­interest of individuals was creative. Individuals created a modern culture: this was Burckhardt’s first theorem, adjusted by a corollary—­that unbridled individualism destroys culture.21

2. ​Exalted Premonitions Was Pico a lord of this disorder? His relatives—­“minor princes of the ­house of Pico”—­were pale fire next to the Sforza conflagrations. The Pico mentioned first by Burckhardt was Gianfrancesco—­because he died like a Sforza, ambushed at night by his ­brother’s son. This pious scholar was a critic of the church’s laxity, but another of his u ­ ncles, Galeotto, held religion in contempt. Lodovico, a ­brother who opposed Gianfrancesco’s claim to head the f­ amily, came as a ghost to haunt a siege of Mirandola. Anecdotes about t­ hese relatives fill out “the tone and atmosphere . . . ​that seem more essential”—to Burckhardt—­“than par­tic­u­lar events.”22 Although Giovanni’s presence is larger, Burckhardt’s words about him would fill only a few pages of text. Introduced as Gianfrancesco’s ­uncle, he comes back seven times more, given less attention than Ariosto, Boccaccio, Dante, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Poggio, Pontano, Savonarola, or a number of popes, just as the h ­ ouses of Aragon, Bentivogli, Borgia, Colonna, Este, Gonzaga, Medici, Montefeltro, Sforza, and Visconti get more notice than Mirandola’s lesser princes.23 Except as Gianfrancesco’s u ­ ncle, Giovanni never appears in the essay’s first two chapters. In the third, on the revival of antiquity, we meet him as a humanist who studied Hebrew and Arabic even before Reuchlin: Pico della Mirandola had all the talmudic and philosophical knowledge of a learned rabbi. . . . ​We must linger a bit . . . ​before moving on to the larger consequences of humanism. He was the only one who argued loudly and forcefully for the knowledge and truth of all ages against the one-­sided emphasis on classical antiquity. He valued not only Averroes and Jewish scholars for their factual content but also scholastics of the ­Middle Ages. He believes he hears them saying that we s­ hall live forever not in the quibbling schools but among the wise, where they dispute not

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s t o r i e s a bo u t p i c o about Andromache’s ­mother or Niobe’s sons but about the deeper c­ auses of divine and h ­ uman ­things; one who comes closer w ­ ill see that even the barbarians had the spirit (Mercurius) in their hearts, not on their tongues. He writes a power­f ul Latin not lacking in beauty and clear in pre­sen­ta­ tion, and he despises purist pedantry and any overrating of borrowed form, especially when combined with one-­sidedness and disrespect for the full, factual truth. In him one can perceive the sublime turn that Italian philosophy would have taken had the Counter-­Reformation not destroyed the w ­ hole higher life of the spirit.

Blind devotion to antiquity was a flaw of humanism, which Pico opposed by defending the technical language of scholastic philosophy and by promoting Jewish learning and other sources of exotic wisdom. Having come to doubt the value of German neo-­humanism in his own day, Burckhardt saw Pico’s reservations about classicism as progressive, making philosophy richer u ­ ntil the Counter-­Reformation fi­nally crushed Italy’s genius.24 Before that unhappy moment, the prince had joined the “famous group of scholars gathered around Lorenzo and united by the higher attraction of an idealist philosophy. . . . ​Only in such com­pany could a Pico della Mirandola feel content.” But Burckhardt had no illusions about t­ hese “enraptured Florentine Platonists”: their influence on society was slight. Denouncing humanists as self-­centered and irresponsible, he saw their pedantry as too removed from the world that they wanted to change. On this count—­ despite Pico’s Platonic sympathies—­Burckhardt admired him for being open to wisdom that was not Greek or Roman.25 On the other hand, he left Pico out when he dealt with other topics relevant to the prince’s story. When he discussed biographies based on classical models but well suited to modern personalities, he made no mention of Gianfrancesco’s Vita—­which he had certainly read. When he criticized prodigies who learned the classics by rote before learning good judgment, their ambition, impudence, and superficiality reminded him of the ancient Sophists—­but not of Pico’s feats.26 ­After entering as a critic of classicism, Pico comes on stage next a­ fter the drama has turned—at the end of the fourth chapter, on discovery. Burckhardt describes new encounters with o ­ thers and selves when artists and scientists took pains to observe their natu­ral and social worlds. Genre paintings—­secular scenes from ordinary life, often with moral messages—­ were artifacts of such observations, but Italian paint­ers produced them



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only in the l­ater sixteenth c­ entury, according to Burckhardt. Italian writers examined daily life much ­earlier, however, with sublime eff ect in Dante’s Commedia and with insight in the memoirs of Aeneas Sylvius. Other works of prose and poetry followed suit, but the genuine portrayal of peasant life is especially notable in Lorenzo the Magnificent and the poets of his circle . . . ​­toward the end of the fifteenth ­century, when the treatment of country life in true genre form emerged. This could happen only in Italy ­because it was only ­t here that the peasants . . . ​had ­human dignity (Menschenwürde), personal freedom and freedom of movement. . . . ​The distinction between town and village was far less pronounced than in the north. . . . ​A constant flow ran everywhere from country to city. . . . ​Nowhere do we hear the note of horrible, contemptuous class hatred against the vilains. . . . ​Italian authors are much more cognizant of meaning and greatness of any type as it appears in peasant life, . . . ​making poetic treatment . . . ​pos­si­ble. . . . ​ But Lorenzo the Magnificent transports himself into the peasant’s point of view with a wholly distinctive force. In his Nencia di Barberino . . . ​t he poet’s objectivity is of a k ind that leaves one doubting . . . ​­whether he means to show sympathy or scorn. . . . ​Lorenzo indulges deliberately in the coarse realism of ­humble country life and still gives a g eneral impression of true poetry. . . .

When Burckhardt compared the Nencia to similar eff orts by Poliziano and the irreverent Luigi Pulci, he saw Lorenzo’s gypsy love-­song as clearly one of the first products of the genuinely modern tendency to locate one’s poetic consciousness in the position of p ­ eople of any class. . . . ​The novelty is to enter into another’s world of feeling. . . . ​For the first time, one fully understood h ­ umans and humanity in their deeper nature. . . . ​The logical concept of humanity had long been known, but t­ hese Italians knew the facts. . . . ​On this topic, the most exalted premonitions w ­ ere uttered by Pico in his speech on the dignity of man (Würde des Menschen), which certainly must be called one of the noblest legacies of that cultural epoch. God, at the final stage of genesis, created man to know the laws of the cosmos, love its beauty and admire its grandeur. He bound him to no fixed place, to no specific activity, to no necessary obligations, but gave him mobility and ­f ree ­w ill.

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The h ­ uman freedom and dignity in this climactic passage have emerged, as Burckhardt tracked them, from society and politics. Learned Italians w ­ ere aware of peasant farmers b ­ ecause class hatred had not cut them off from the countryside and country p ­ eople. Society was more fluid in Italy than elsewhere, and artists saw that peasants have the dignity that comes from freedom of person and freedom of movement. The corresponding aesthetic freedom, first asserted in fiction and poetry, chose any perspective, moving into points of view blocked elsewhere by law and custom. “To enter into another’s world of feeling” was the novel liberty claimed by Italian artists as subjects observing any and all objects, what­ever and wherever they might be, perceived by creative ­people unafraid to express what they saw. With this passport to new territories of perception and expression, artists went where they liked. But the profane Pulci, like the saintly Battista Mantovano, was badly equipped for the voyage. Poetic empathy found its truest voice—­a vibrant realism also achieved by Poliziano—in the proud Lorenzo. As t­ hese artists transported themselves to remote shores of experience, p ­ eople truly understood the h ­ uman condition—­not just its logic but its facts—­for the first time. Medieval phi­ los­o­phers had debated definitions of the ­human essence; Re­nais­sance artists first examined humankind objectively by making new conditions of observation pos­si­ble.27 “On this topic, the loftiest ideas ­were expressed by Pico in his speech on the dignity of man,” Burckhardt concluded. In only ten lines of commentary, he understood the prince to say that man knows, loves, and won­ders at the cosmos. The universe of creatures contains ­humans but does not fix them in place or bind them to any one type of l­abor, b ­ ecause they have f­ ree ­will and mobility—­like peasants ­going to town when they want to, or like artists changing their points of view. Then Burckhardt took twelve lines from the Oration—­part quotation, part paraphrase—­telling how God stationed man at the center of the world, from where any of it could be observed. But the new Adam, not yet mortal or immortal, was not confined to earth or barred from heaven. Likewise, by shaping and subduing themselves, h ­ uman subjects could make themselves objects of their own artistry, sinking into decay or rising to rebirth, whereas animals, which w ­ ere never more than their bodies, neither ­rose nor fell. Even an angel’s life is static. The ­will to grow and change is mankind’s alone. God planted seeds in ­humans from which any life can sprout.



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Fewer than two hundred words, pivotal in Burckhardt’s essay and momentous for Pico’s reputation, linked the prince with sociopo­liti­cal and aesthetic prob­lems of ­great interest to critics (like Burckhardt) of modern Eu­ro­pean culture but far removed from the awareness, if not the circumstances, of Re­nais­sance thinkers—­including Pico. The freedom to choose recedes a­ fter the first few pages of the Oration and its fable of creation. Neither rural social mobility nor the artist’s response to it was within the prince’s range, much less the scope of his speech.28 Just before closing his fourth chapter, however, Burckhardt promised to pursue the social question in chapter five, to show “that in the Italy of this period, diff erences of birth between classes of p ­ eople lost their importance.” In fact, the chapter on social life and festivals not only asserts that “the main trend of the time was obviously the amalgamation of classes as conceived in the modern world” but also concludes that “the artistic splendor displayed by Italy in the Re­nais­sance was achieved only by that same sharing in life by all classes which was also the basis of society in Italy.” Pico makes no appearance in this chapter.29 We meet Pico again in the final chapter, on morality and religion, in an anecdote about Savonarola, an e­ nemy of culture and the state but a hero of religion. Noting that the friar was stricter about visions had by ­others than about his own, Burckhardt mentioned his funeral sermon for the prince, where he treats his deceased friend rather pitilessly. Despite an inner voice that came from God, Pico would still not enter the Order, which caused Savonarola to pray to God to punish him somewhat, though he had not r­ eally wished his death, and now b ­ ecause of all Pico’s alms and prayers his soul was in purgatory. Mentioning a consoling vision that Pico had on his sickbed, where the Madonna appeared and promised that he would not die, Savonarola admitted that he took it to be a demonic trick for some time, u ­ ntil it was revealed to him that the Madonna had meant the second, that is, the eternal death. If this and similar statements ­were presumptuous, this ­great soul atoned for them, in any case, with a punishment as ­bitter as could be.

The ­great soul was Savonarola’s, and Pico was the victim of his pastoral care. Other­wise, Burckhardt follows Gianfrancesco’s Vita to comment on the d ­ ying Pico’s spirituality and to authenticate his repentance.30 This restatement of Savonarola’s perverse eulogy stands in contrast to Burckhardt’s next mention of Pico and his Oration. A footnote points back

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to the passage on freedom and dignity at the end of Burckhardt’s fourth chapter, but now the topic is the subversion of Christian faith and morals by the revival of antiquity and the discovery of the world, producing modern attitudes like individualism, skepticism, subjectivism, tolerance, and worldliness. “When church dogma decayed and asserted itself through tyranny,” Burckhardt argued, religion inevitably became more the concern of the individual subject and personal opinion, proving that the spirit was still alive in Eu­rope. . . . ​ In Italy each went his own way, and thousands who w ­ ere indiff erent to religion w ­ ere stranded on the high seas of life, which makes one think all the better of t­ hose who won through to a religion for the individual and held on to it. . . . ​Worldliness, which marks so clear a contrast between the ­Middle Ages and the Re­nais­sance, . . . ​is of itself no more hostile to religion than the so-­called cultural interests that now take the place of religion, except that t­ hese interests, as we practice them, give us only a dim picture of the universal state of excitement that came over ­people b ­ ecause so many ­great ­t hings ­were seen anew. . . . ​It is a sublime necessity of the modern spirit that this worldliness cannot be left ­behind, that the drive to explore humanity and real­ity overwhelms the spirit and becomes its goal.

This passage—­connected by a footnote to the e­ arlier statement about freedom and dignity—­reinforces what Burckhardt had said about the Oration as confirming the instinct for freedom in mobile Italian peasants and in observations of them from shifting artistic perspectives. Having bypassed Pico in the fifth chapter, on social mobility and artistic achievement, Burckhardt returned to his speech in the sixth with language worthy of Hegel. Although Savonarola certified the orator’s penitential habits, the Oration itself asserted a “sublime necessity of the modern spirit.” This worldly necessity, despite its ruinous results for religion, was an inexorable force in the modern culture (likewise ruinous) inaugurated by the Italian Re­nais­sance.31 Burckhardt’s reader has met Pico in four roles: as a critic of classicism; a companion of Lorenzo’s in Platonic speculation; a penitent d ­ ying in Savonarola’s merciless care; and, most conspicuously, a champion of ­human dignity and freedom—­specifically the modern, worldly freedom to shape one’s character by exploring nature and humanity in the h ­ ere and now. Burckhardt’s next Pico is a foe of superstition.



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For all their sophistication—as Burckhardt saw it—­Italy’s pioneers of culture ­were in some ways more vulnerable to superstition than their medieval ancestors. By reviving the wisdom of the ancients, they resurrected a g­ reat deal of foolishness: magic, astrology, demonology, and divination ­were part and parcel of Greco-­Roman antiquity. To reach higher ground, the Re­nais­sance had to rise above the oblivion that reduced classical eloquence to whispers in the M ­ iddle Ages. But ancient wisdom’s voice was also a R oman witch screeching and the chant of a G reek diviner. Ficino, an eminence of Platonism, feared demons b ­ ecause he was a Christian, and as a phi­los­o­pher he constructed new theories to explain magic and astrology. “By contrast,” according to Burckhardt, Pico della Mirandola made an epochal change in this domain with his famous rebuttal. In astral superstition he finds a root of all ungodliness and immorality. If the astrologer believes in anything at all, it must be the planets that he worships as his gods. . . . ​Nothing promotes evil more than when heaven itself seems to be its author, thus causing belief in eternal salvation and damnation to wither away. Pico even took the trou­ble to check the astrologers empirically. . . . ​But his main achievement . . . ​was a positive Christian theory of world government and freedom of the ­will.

Pico opposed astrology as immoral and irreligious, according to Burckhardt, and objected mainly to its determinism, which the prince countered with a defense of f­ ree ­w ill. The crucial link between the Disputations against astrology and the Oration is this concept of ­f ree ­human agency—­a force that could liberate ­human dignity from magical constraints. Though Burckhardt only implied this connection, he was alert to the threat of astrological fate. Without freedom and the responsibility that freedom entails, the Christian afterlife as a site of moral reckoning becomes implausible, and without heaven or hell ­t here is no place for immortality.32 Some of Pico’s contemporaries, instructed by pagan sages, w ­ ere ready to give up on that doctrine too. But Pico joined Ficino and upheld it by Christianizing the latter’s Platonism—or so Burckhardt thought. In his view, the finest product of Florentine Platonism was the theism distilled from Chris­ tian­ity in hymns by Lorenzo, the same poet whose recognition of h ­ uman dignity in peasants gave Burckhardt the occasion to cite Pico’s fable of Genesis. Lorenzo’s hymns signify gains made by his era over medieval culture

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when the Re­nais­sance ­rose above its own limitations to “awareness of the world and of man.” Although Burckhardt ended his essay with this praise of Lorenzo’s naturalism, he also regretted that traditional Christian obligations still constrained the Magnifico and his friends. “From his youth ­until the end of his life,” he conceded, “Lorenzo gave expression to a dogmatic Chris­ tian­ity, and even Pico, ­under the sway of Savonarola, ­adopted a monkish and ascetic attitude.” In this final appearance, Pico’s last in Burckhardt’s essay, the prince succumbs to a harsher version of the world-­denying dogma from which Lorenzo partly freed himself. Pico’s servile asceticism stands in contrast to Lorenzo’s f­ ree and world-­a ffirming love of God’s creation. If Lorenzo’s worldlier theism was the “highest achievement” of Florentine Platonism, Pico’s Christian adaptation of that ancient philosophy must have been something less, despite Burckhardt’s kind words for it ­earlier on. Reading Burckhardt’s essay this closely may be unfair to a g­ reat work of art, whose artistry relies so much on anecdotes. In one place, ­after Pico has been identified as a critic of classicism, he returns to expose a paradox—­ superstition sustained by a classical revival. In another place, a­ fter half-­a-­ sentence shows how his Platonic piety served to confirm the soul’s immortality and protect morality, another half-­sentence makes him an ascetic foil to Lorenzo’s Platonizing worldliness. We are not meant to reassemble a mind from t­ hese fragments.33 What stands out in this fractured portrait is one juncture, prominent in Pico’s modern fame, and one disjuncture, noticed less often. The first joins the positive freedom of self-­fashioning, as asserted in the Oration, to negative freedom from astrological fate, as argued in the Disputations: this is evidence of coherence. The second disjoins the Oration’s exaltation of ­human dignity from its repudiation by Pico’s asceticism: this is evidence of incoherence. Neither the connection nor the disconnection is explicit, but both weigh in the balance b ­ ecause Burckhardt’s anecdotes about Pico became the prince’s story. A ­ fter more than a ­century and a half, the result has been to identify him with the dignity of man as a h umanist ideal (despite Burckhardt’s doubts about humanism) and with the strug­gle against superstition as a step ­toward modernity. Burckhardt’s essay says nothing about the purpose of the Oration—to introduce the 900 Conclusions. Since the Conclusions culminate in statements about Kabbalah, and since more t­ heses deal with Kabbalah than any



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other topic, why not focus on Kabbalah and read the Oration in light of the Conclusions? Who has done this? Not Burckhardt. But his portrait of the orator is too well drawn to leave in anyone’s Pico Box, and his sentences are the mightiest ever written about the prince. The soaring m ­ usic of the Oration’s prelude was an irresistible temptation to rhapsodize: even Burckhardt, a f astidious critic, succumbed. His conclusion is uncharacteristically decisive: on “­human dignity and personal freedom,” it was Pico who “uttered the most exalted premonitions”—­premonitions of modernity—­ “in his speech on the dignity of man.”34 ­These intimations, as Burckhardt felt them, ­were insights from a ‘Re­nais­sance man.’ When Burckhardt was born, however, what ­people now call the ‘Re­nais­sance’ had yet to be discovered and described—­most memorably by Burckhardt himself. Nearly a ­century had to pass before his pre­sen­ta­tion of Eu­rope’s past would be taken as the norm. Then, in 1916, Giovanni Gentile linked it with another momentous idea—­“the concept of man in the Re­nais­sance.” This was the title of an article by Gentile that quickly became famous—­a long with its author. When he explored the concept in question and praised Pico for promoting it, he was already a prominent intellectual and active in politics. Then Mussolini made him the architect of Fascist culture and a p ower­ful celebrity. In ­these roles, Gentile formulated policies, framed laws, and created institutions—­most controversially and eff ectively in public education. Some of his designs—­ like the Enciclopedia italiana, now online—­survived the collapse of Fascism and still thrive.35 One such institution, Italy’s National Institute for Re­nais­sance Studies, was created (first as a C enter) in 1937 to promulgate and propagate the notion of an Italian Re­nais­sance ­imagined by Burckhardt and inherited by Gentile. By that time, Gentile—­still a celebrity and still loyal to Mussolini’s Party—­was no longer a p o­liti­cal power in Italy. A more durable Fascist, Giuseppe Bottai, had to start the new Center and find a director. If publicity was Bottai’s main motive, he could have made no better choice than Giovanni Papini. This unruly thinker had been on stage in Italy since before World War I, and the spectacle became global a few years ­later. With Papini flagrantly in charge, the new Center was made official on July  29, 1937. Three months ­later, Eugenio Garin, a b rilliant protégé of Gentile, whose eye for talent was sharp, published the book that put Pico della Mirandola at the center of Gentile’s Re­nais­sance and Burckhardt’s—­ and square in the sights of Papini’s Center.36

3

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Pico Resurgent He experimented with the power of the Spirit, . . . ​and from that experience he took the theme that celebrates h ­ uman dignity. —­g a r i n

1. ​Yorick, Papini, and Pico In 1937, when Giovanni Papini dedicated his History of Italian Lit­er­a­ture to Mussolini, the author was a superstar, celebrated for A Spent Man, his premature autobiography of 1913, and even more for his Story of Christ, an international bestseller ­after 1921. Papini’s book about Jesus reflected his own conversion to Catholicism—­a big turn for the former editor of Lacerba, a Futurist magazine whose charter declared that “religions, moralities and laws have their only excuse in the rabblement and popu­lar lassitude.”1 In April 1940, Papini produced this meditation for Il Corriere della Sera: A few days ago I held the skull of Pico della Mirandola in my hands—­ the skull of the most miraculous young man from an age that was truly a season for h ­ uman miracles. The skull is well formed and well preserved, . . . ​huge and youthful: Pico died before his thirty-­second birthday. The skull of a jester inspired eloquent thoughts in Prince Hamlet; the skull of this most learned Count . . . ​should inspire higher and greater thoughts. I l ook into the deep eye sockets . . . ​, trying to see inside the dark cavity that held that wonderful brain. . . . ​Out falls a speck of dust, . . . ​t he last mortal residue of the organ for thinking that stupefied the world. . . . ​Staring at that empty cranium, it would be easy . . . ​to polish up the old commonplaces, worn but still correct, on transient h ­ uman glories and useless h ­ uman knowledge. 92



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But for us ­today, Pico can suggest thoughts less solemn and spacious, yet newer perhaps. . . . ​He lives on in ­human imagination—­the memory of historians of philosophy is not what I mean—as the symbol of limitless learning, universal and omnivorous wisdom, hunger and thirst for e­ very truth and all understanding. The young prodigy . . . ​appears in the eyes of posterity as the Croesus of culture, the G ­ reat Alexander of thought.2

How or w ­ hether Papini got his hands on Pico’s skull remains to be seen: maybe ­there had already been an exhumation in San Marco before the much-­hyped DNA hunt of 2008. Or maybe he envisioned himself as Pico resurrected—­this fantasist who based his thinking on a “flight from real­ ity, not accepting real­ity but rejecting it.” Recalling his breakthrough in 1903, when he joined the other found­ers of Leonardo—­the ­little magazine that made him famous—he singled himself out as “the only one with a concept and a ba sic direction. . . . ​Every­one already saw me as the indispensable leader, and . . . ​I got the idea of rolling out a big speech or manifesto of some kind, . . . ​though I cannot now reproduce what I said on that night of sham conspiracy. . . . ​I had to find a word, a maxim, a goal, an aspiration to move and unite them all.” Could anyone doubt who should take the lead and speak? “With no guide, with no plan of any kind, nothing but frenzy and ­every passionate impulse,” Papini told his own story—­a “hard and magnificent life of knowing every­thing.”3 To preach about the omnisapient Pico, he had his choice of pulpits. A leading newspaper carried the original column in 1940. Then in 1942 Papini reprinted his l­ ittle essay in Imitating the F ­ ather, the fourth volume of a Library of the Re­nais­sance, a collection produced by the new National Center for Re­nais­sance Studies, founded in 1937, with himself as charter director. The Fascist boss who started ­these wheels turning was Giuseppe Bottai, minister of education, who still had that job in 1943. Why would a practiced politician put a volatile literary celebrity in charge of a national research center? Papini was exciting and prolific, but scholarship was not his calling. His History of Italian Lit­er­a­ture never got past its first volume. Although Papini was unpredictable, Bottai expected the old agitator’s fame to put a shine on Italy’s adventures in Ethiopia. Disgrace ­after 1914 had destroyed the credibility of the belligerent avant-­garde that Papini and his partners—­Giuseppe Prezzolini and Ardengo Soffici—­had created before the war. But the ruins of their radicalism gave Mussolini a platform, and Papini’s books kept selling.

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Even better—­from Bottai’s perspective in 1935—­Papini had already gone into print in 1934 to accuse the Nazis of a “Raid by Racists.” At that moment, before combat in Ethiopia changed Mussolini’s calculus, Papini’s bizarre declaration suited the Party’s position: just as the Reformation was a “German rebellion against Rome’s primacy,” he maintained, so was racism “Germany’s final b ­ attle against Rome.” Writing in a C atholic magazine, he defended the native Italian faith that he had defined elsewhere by its non-­Jewishness. In his Story of Christ, Jews betrayed the Messiah ­because “­after drinking deep from their humiliations,” they w ­ ere “carnal, material, worldly, full of rancor and evil thoughts.” ­After 1935, when the Fascists needed help for a n ew campaign of explic­itly anti-­Semitic Romanità, this acrobat of inconsistency could produce by keeping his standards low and his profile high.4 How to understand Papini’s resurrection as an impresario of Fascist culture? Answers lie in his astonishing—no, appalling—­biography and in Italy’s dismal history u ­ nder Mussolini. My smaller questions are t­ hese: Why should Director Papini have thought it necessary, in the early 1940s, to rescue Pico from historians? Why make him an icon of imagination, not of memory? Was he ­really like ­those fabled overreachers, Croesus and Alexander? Why call his hollow skull a relic of unrestrained intellectual craving—­and not the vanity of ­human wishes? Even a few questions call for a long story about Pico as the author of his ­ ill expose other Oration. Teasing out a few threads from this intricate tale w patches of the tapestry—­including what Italians thought of the prince and his speech between 1850 and 1950. What that tumultuous era produced is still, in a number of variants, the standard account of his life and thought. My account is dif­fer­ent: • ­after he died in 1494, Pico’s celebrity never faded; • he continued to be famous • for his remarkable life, • for his opposition to astrology, • for his invention of Christian Kabbalah, • but not as the author of an Oration on the Dignity of Man; • the Oration attracted l­ ittle attention before the nineteenth c­ entury; • it was seldom published before the twentieth ­century; • the speech does not exalt the dignity of man; • it promotes ascetic mysticism;



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• the notion of dignity usually ascribed to it is post-­Kantian and Romantic; • this anachronistic reading of the Oration started late in the Enlightenment; • Kabbalah is prominent in Pico’s works between the Commento and the Heptaplus; • Kabbalah is also the key to the Oration’s ascetic spirituality; • a key is needed ­because Pico’s speech is explic­itly esoteric. In Italy the Pico of the standard account (described throughout this book in a number of variants) is an artifact of modern ideologies that emerged from the Risorgimento and its sequel u ­ nder Giovanni Giolitti and Benito Mussolini. A recent bibliography of works about Pico and editions of his writings lists more than 800 items ­after 1899, but fewer than 80 for the preceding ­century, when even Italian scholars came to him late and not in large numbers.5 A modern monographic lit­er­a­ture on Pico began in Italy with an article by Domenico Berti in 1859, just ­after two books on the prince ­were published by German scholars. For the next three de­cades, this first Italian study of Pico within the conventions of critical scholarship had ­little competition, and it is still useful. At the time, Berti was thinking about freedom of conscience and working on a b iography of Bruno. In politics, meanwhile, he won ministerial office by taking conservative stands, u ­ ntil he turned left again. Po­liti­cal exposure helped sell his acclaimed biography of Camillo Cavour, Italy’s first prime minister, published by Berti in 1886. During the same period, Francesco Fiorentino protested the “foreign yoke” of northern philosophy by promoting a distinctly Italian history of Re­nais­sance thought. Fiorentino aimed to “emancipate” Italy’s intellectual heritage and “restore national dignity.” 6 Berti mentioned the Oration briefly, linking it not with dignity, however, but with esoteric syncretism as a framework for Kabbalah, which he identified as an enduring—­and unhealthy—­interest of Pico’s. Once the prince succumbed to the “literary polytheism” of Poliziano and other materialists, he was ready to go off the deep end with Neoplatonism and Kabbalah. Although Berti wrote famous books about Bruno and liberty, he did not treat Pico as a freedom fighter. All around him, however, other liberals and nationalists w ­ ere lighting fires of revolution and feeding the patriotic flames with local history. ­Father Felice Ceretti, a s pecialist on

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Mirandola, could think of “no city in Italy, no m ­ atter how small, that cannot boast of once having been a residence of fearsome lords and a homeland of famous persons.” Amateur and professional scholars, looking for heroes close to home, searched archives and libraries for material on Pico’s pedigree and testimonies to his fame. The Risorgimento was the morning of Pico’s resurgence.7

2. ​Oreglia and the Blood Libel ­ ntil Papini compared the prince to Yorick, the strangest turn in his postU mortem fortunes came in the early 1880s, when F ­ ather Giuseppe Oreglia published a l ong series of articles in Civiltà Cattolica, an authoritative Jesuit biweekly (2019 is its 169th year) with a large readership. Writing in the 1870s, one Italian identified the “insufficiency of h ­ uman reason” as the “fundamental idea of this periodical.” If half the ­people who bought Civiltà Cattolica also read it, a large Italian audience first came to know Pico in Oreglia’s telling, not as the herald of h ­ uman dignity but as a m isguided scholastic who trusted Jews too much. Oreglia was a founder of the magazine, writing both before and ­after 1870, when it was fi­nally settled—at least in the secular world—­that the pope could no longer have even a few battalions. As the Church lost control of her lands in Italy, Oreglia and his colleagues stirred up sympathy for the Holy F ­ ather as the “prisoner of the Vatican.” Italian enemies of the pope who wanted to make Rome the capital of their new nation ­were denounced in Civiltà Cattolica, again and again, as an anti-­Christian conspiracy of Jews, Masons, and other reprobates.8 The priest’s “Con­temporary Chronicle” appeared in ­every issue of the Jesuit magazine, commenting on current aff airs in Rome, the rest of Italy, and beyond. Presented in an anonymous and official voice, the column often turned to the past, but always with an eye on the pre­sent. Making propaganda against enemies of the faith was ­Father Oreglia’s standing assignment, as he returned in issue a­ fter issue to the old charge of ritual murder—­the blood libel—­against Jews. Since the beginning of the ­century, a few new incidents—­notably an 1840 report of a Catholic priest gone missing in Damascus—­had stirred up the lurid lit­er­a­ture that Oreglia relied on. Resentments and suspicions grew again a­ fter the Edgardo Mortara scandal erupted in 1858, starting not with rumors of ritual murder but when Church officials kidnapped a Jewish boy who had been secretly baptized.9



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At the time of the kidnapping, Paul Drach—­the converted son of a learned Jew—­was a papal librarian in Rome: he followed up his Letter of a Converted Rabbi with books On the Harmony between the Church and the Synagogue and On the Kabbalah of the Hebrews, the latter criticizing Adolphe Franck’s study of the same topic. Franck—­a follower of Victor Cousin, who was a p rovocative secularist receptive to spiritualism—­introduced Kabbalah to many nineteenth-­century Christians, writing when France was not yet crazed by the Dreyfus scandal.10 Drach was well known to Oreglia and sanitized by conversion. But in 1883, ­a fter new accusations came from Tisza-­Eszlar in Hungary, the priest also cited an older pamphlet by ‘Neofitus,’ a conventional label for a convert. This Neofitus, a Greek monk claiming to have been a r abbi, wrote to confirm the blood libel: international unrest about the protracted inquiry in Hungary brought him back into print. Accusations began in the usual way with an outcry about a missing Christian, a young girl. The subsequent spectacle of brutality ­u nder ­legal cover outraged Louis Kossuth, a Hungarian revolutionary, then exiled in Torino. Kossuth denounced the Hungarian authorities for taking his country back to the M ­ iddle Ages. Then the girl’s body was found: when physicians examined it, they saw no marks of vio­lence at all, much less any evidence of ritual slaughter.11 Kossuth was a high-­value target for Oreglia, who did not tarry for facts in demolishing critics of anti-­Semitism. Hating Jews, he explained, is simply the order of nature, arising from a “perpetual and universal antipathy, not so much the world against Jews as Jews . . . ​against the non-­Jewish world, especially the Christian one.” Jews made ­matters worse for themselves, he charged, by resisting the “exceptional laws”—­confinement to a ghetto, for example—­enacted in Italy for their own good. As for the stories from Tisza-­Eszlar, the prudent course was to await clarification, and then wait again. Meanwhile, to satisfy restless readers, Oreglia printed a communication in Latin from “an impor­tant person” who brought more news—­actually old lies recycled—of ritual murder in Hungary.12 The most remarkable ­thing about Oreglia’s comments on Tisza-­Eszlar is not their tawdry anti-­Semitism but their placement—in the same piece that ends his series of communications about Pico and Kabbalah, which he had begun months ­earlier ­after mocking a Pa­ri­sian rabbi for denying the blood libel. Oreglia’s serial examination of Pico opens and closes by slandering Jews and Masons: but why?13

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Blaming the Bible for Jewish treachery might off end pious Christians: for a safer target, Oreglia turned to post-­biblical texts, making a distinction between ‘Mosaic’ Judaism and the rabbinic or ‘Talmudic’ kind and identifying the latter with Kabbalah. Christians had been burning the Talmud for centuries: to find fire, just look for smoke. However, Oreglia also knew that some scholars—­respectable authorities among them—­agreed with Pico that a ‘true Kabbalah’ in this l­ater lit­er­a­ture confirmed Christian doctrine. But righ­teous truth was not the perfidy that Oreglia needed. To discredit claims about a good Kabbalah, he pointed out—­correctly—­that no Kabbalah at all was known to Christians u ­ ntil Pico found it. Charging that Pico’s findings ­were perverse—­though useful in the long run to document Jewish treachery—­the Jesuit backed his indictment up with an extensive study of the Count of Concord.14 Oreglia’s writing was sensationalist and conspiratorial, proceeding by indirection, insinuation, interrogation, bad a nalogies, weak associations, and manipulations of emotion and prejudice. Scouring the hateful pamphlets, he piled rumors on rumors and heaped secrets on secrets, using one puzzle to unpuzzle the next. Wondering why “no Jew nor even any convert ever showed Kabbalah to Christians before Pico,” he would not accept that many Jews knew ­little or nothing about it. Maybe they refused to talk ­because they saw Kabbalah as baffling to Christians yet risky for themselves: “Exactly this was the reason alleged by Neofitus, the ex-­rabbi from Moldavia, to explain the same fact about the ritual use of Christian blood in the modern synagogue.” Secrecy about ritual murder explained why Kabbalah was secret. If someone objected that “at least one Jew showed Kabbalah and its books to Pico,” the reply was that even the prince’s ­great mind could do l­ ittle with such “obscure and unreadable” material. The impenetrable underwrote the inscrutable.15 Throughout 1883, Oreglia focused his column on Pico as a Kabbalist, stating this case: • Pico’s story is part of a larger story. • The larger story is about Kabbalah and Masonry. • Kabbalah and Masonry are Jewish and gentile versions of the same evil ideology. • Kabbalah is Talmudic religion. • Ritual use of infant Christian blood is still the main rite of Talmudic religion.



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• Historically, the most famous such incident happened in Trent in 1475. • Trent authenticates many ­later such cases, and vice-­versa. • All ­these cases, past and pre­sent, prove the evils of Talmudic religion. • Pico first revealed the Talmudic religion of Kabbalah to Christians. • All Kabbalah is evil; ­there is no good Kabbalah. • Pico’s big ­mistake was to believe in a good Kabbalah and promote it. • But he deserves credit for uncovering evidence that can set the rec­ord straight. The conclusion may seem remiss in light of the official rec­ord: Innocent VIII had condemned the Conclusions that advertised Pico’s discovery of Kabbalah, and the prince’s insolent Apology only angered the pope more. What could Oreglia do but concur in a pa pal condemnation of Pico’s statements—­especially his ravings about Kabbalah? No need to disown the author himself, however, whom Rome eventually absolved of personal guilt. Furthermore, Pico’s Conclusions and Apology convinced Oreglia that he was an acute scholastic thinker and a good Thomist: in that persona Pico could be praised for the genius that had long been part of his story.16 Along with hate-­mongering pamphlets on ritual murder, F ­ ather Oreglia also read Pico’s works carefully, while studying the recent lit­er­a­ture about him as well. But he framed his picture with the blood libel. He acknowledged Pico’s celebrity, and yet the prince was a sideshow for him. The aff ecting story of this aristocratic prodigy was just an occasion to remind the faithful of their Christian duty to hate Jews. Oreglia studied Pico only to support an “account of Masonry and its links with the Kabbalah of the rabbis.” To promote the slander, the priest inserted his findings into a longer narrative that he had been assembling for de­cades, as a founding editor of Civiltà Cattolica. Foul gossip from Paris and Tisza-­ Eszlar tied his propaganda to current events, but the lies also fed on old defamations compiled by Christians over the centuries, even before the events in Trent.17 The woodcut depicting what never happened in Trent comes from the Nuremberg Chronicles, showing nine Jews committing a r itual murder (Figure 4). Labels give the names Angelus, Vital, Seligman, Mayir, Sauniel, ἀ obias, Israhel, Gruncia, and Moyses to the figures surrounding Simon martyr. In the trial rec­ords, the pictured males are Engel, Vital, Seligman,

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Figure 4. ​The Trent blood libel, Nuremberg Chronicles.

Mayer, Samuel, Tobias, Israel, and Moses. Gruncia, the ­woman misnamed at the left of the picture, was prob­ably called Gütlein. ­After torture, they all confessed to Simon’s murder. The males w ­ ere burned alive—­after more torture. Gütlein’s fate is unknown. Seven other Jews from Trent’s small community ­were also tortured and killed.18 As for Simon, he became Santo Simonino or Simoncino. His feast day was March 24—­until 1965, when his name was struck from the roster of saints. The faithful can venerate his images in Italian churches, however, and plaques honoring him still decorate buildings in Trent, where a San Simonino Committee was founded in 2007 to “re-­establish public and private veneration of . . . ​this innocent martyr.” When Simonino died in 1475,



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he was not yet three years old. The Chronicles shows an older child tortured by circumcision and multiple lacerations, inflicted to collect Christian blood for a Jewish rite.19 In Trent and the surrounding region, eight other such incidents—­ rumors, accusations, sometimes executions of Jews for infanticide—­are on rec­ord ­a fter 1430. That the Chronicles sets such stories in a Christian landscape seen from Nuremberg is no surprise: the obtuse depravity of the stories is shocking but not startling. In fact, when the Chronicles reports an e­ arlier burning of Jews in 1337, the woodcut showing the execution is the same one that illustrates other murders in 1492, just as other stock images ­were used to put ­faces—­t hough not individual ­faces—on the many emperors, kings, popes, generals, cardinals, bishops, and other notables pictured on e­ very page. The publishers economized by using only a third as many woodblocks, 645, as t­ here are woodcuts in their big book—1,809. Part of the savings was the identity of Jews burned alive by Christians.20 Images of Bruni, Perotti, Valla, and other learned Italians—­but not Pico—­illustrated history’s finale, just before the Apocalypse, when the Antichrist was to have come down with his horde of demons to dupe the faithless. Only a f ew Jews w ­ ere shown—­many more scholars and potentates—­but all lived in the last days, whose annals ­were an almanac of catastrophe, warning that the end was near (Figure 1). Scenes of slaughter from Trent and elsewhere ­were shown in the same pages with the Apocalypse to propagate a dif­fer­ent kind of fear. Murdered Jews w ­ ere celebrities of terror and disgrace in this book where—­among Christian celebrities of esteem—­Pico made no appearance. A few years l­ater, however, an update of Giacomo Foresti’s Chronicle—­which was an ancestor of the ­giant Nuremberg history—­presented the prince as the Church’s champion against the Jews, while also recording the murders in Trent. In both chronicles, the crimes of 1475 joined the parade of horrors that F ­ ather Oreglia would publicize in 1883.21 During the previous year, Civiltà Cattolica had published Vatican documents from the Trent ­trials, providing more vile background for Oreglia’s propaganda. In issue ­after issue, his “Con­temporary Chronicle” linked the confessions from Trent with l­ater blood libels, dwelling on “the use of Christian blood in many of their present-­day rites. Given the fact of infanticides—­especially Blessed Simoncino’s—­still committed by Jews

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even in very recent days, only someone who has never dealt with this material can have any doubt.”22

3. ​Festivities in Mirandola Oreglia’s series on Pico had a l ong afterlife, starting in 1894 when it appeared in Mirandola as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Kabbalah: A Critical Historical Study, with a foreword by Francesco Molinari, an avid promoter of local history. To introduce the Jesuit’s subject, Molinari summarized Pico’s life and thought—­mainly his Kabbalah—­while describing Oreglia’s account as a “very learned critical historical monograph” that refutes secularist critics. Without mentioning Berti’s foundational article, Molinari cited pieces published by himself to inform the world about a native son of the Modena region. He had placed ­these articles in the Indicatore Mirandolese, a monthly that he founded in 1877 and that still circulates. In 1884 he reviewed Oreglia’s series for the Indicatore, reprinted it, and then issued it again as a separate volume in 1894. His main task in that year was to help Mirandola remember Pico.23 The Indicatore was the voice of Mirandola’s Commission on Local History and Fine Arts, founded by Molinari in 1868. ­Under the nominal presidency of the mayor, he ran it for thirty years. In January 1894, the town council—­a separate organ­ization—­voted to commemorate the fourth centenary of Pico’s death. Plans w ­ ere made for a public conference, an exhibition, and publications—­including a biography for conference participants, a more thorough monograph, collections of Pico’s poetry, and Molinari’s reprint of Oreglia’s series. The Commission’s collection of Historical Memoirs had already put one old chronicle about the Pico ­family into print, and Molinari himself edited another. The separate monograph on Pico was assigned to ­Father Vincenzo di Giovanni of Palermo, whose work on the prince was “recognized as the most accomplished.” The author of the short biography was a local aristocrat, Marchese Ferdinando Calori Cesis of Modena, who had already published Latin and Italian versions of a celebratory account of Pico. F ­ ather Felice Ceretti, one of ­those responsible for Pico’s sonnets, had been working on local history—in partnership with Molinari—­since 1870. Ceretti was a work­horse of amateur scholarship: by the time he died in 1915, he had produced more than 350 publications, some on Pico, whose f­ amily was an abiding interest for him.24



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Although the 1894 cele­bration was a l ocal aff air, the Commission reached out to the peninsula and the continent. One associate was Enrico De Blais Pico, residing in France: the prince’s immediate ­family had lost control of Mirandola by the early eigh­teenth c­ entury. Another French member was Léon Dorez, whose impor­tant studies of Pico’s poetry, letters, and travels in France began to appear in the mid-1890s. Ceretti’s role was uncertain, however, ­after he and Molinari quarreled in 1892.25 Molinari’s Pico party ended badly. Mauro Sabbatini, whose journalism on the prince went back to 1847, had written a few pages on his life that Ceretti attached to Sonetti inediti by Pico. But the Marchese Calori Cesis doubted that the poems w ­ ere genuine and dismissed Sabbatini’s material as “of ­little value.” Gino Malavisi, a poet from nearby Disvetro, sided with the Marchese but added an appreciation of Pico as a “phi­los­o­pher, believer, writer, and artist.” Ceretti was indomitable, however, and more per­sis­tent than Molinari. When the Commission fired its founder in 1899, Ceretti went public to describe the Pico cele­brations as an illusion contrived by his former partner. He accused Molinari of mismanaging funds and, with Malavisi’s help, manipulating dates of publication to cover his trail, forcing the Commission to oust him. Ceretti added that the 1897 reprint of the Calori Cesis volume, along with the conference itself, had been gutted by the distinguished Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana.26 On the other hand, even though ­Father Ceretti charged Molinari with cooking the books on Di Giovanni’s monograph, he approved of the work itself, echoing applause “from Civiltà Cattolica, which, . . . ​despite outbursts from certain modernists and without changing its colors, has been and always remains ‘the most serious of our modern Italian periodicals.’ ” Di Giovanni examined Pico’s works in the neoscholastic way: parts of his account had already appeared in a Catholic periodical, the Rassegna nazionale, just before Oreglia’s series started. Pico, in the author’s judgment, was pious as well as famous and learned, showing that the greatest Re­nais­sance thinkers ­were devout Christians and that the prince himself was the “true image of the Italian Re­nais­sance.” Focusing on the Conclusions, Apology, and De Ente, Di Giovanni concluded that the prince was serious about metaphysics. He also dealt extensively—­and uncomprehendingly—­with Kabbalah.27 Since Pico was so fierce a critic of astrology, his excitement about Jewish superstition was perplexing to this Catholic scholar: he reasoned that Platonist syncretism must have led him down that false path when he was

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young and impetuous. And yet the prince used Kabbalah to support Church doctrine, showing that his m ­ istakes about it w ­ ere well meant. Surely the young genius did not believe all this nonsense. Like Oreglia, Di Giovanni worked hard to exculpate Pico from his Judaizing, but he never made the Oration part of his case. He gave it only a few unflattering sentences, describing the speech as a “showy” piece that Pico never published; despite its academic content, he concluded, it belonged with the lesser devotional works.28 In 1899, four years before Di Giovanni died, a second edition of his book came out in Mirandola over the imprint of the Commission, the first edition having appeared in Palermo in 1894. Meanwhile, in 1897—­and with no vis­i­ble connection to the Mirandola cele­brations—­Guido Massetani brought out his Kabbalist Philosophy of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in Empoli. His account is up-­to-­date on the history of philosophy and on Pico, citing Berti and Burckhardt as well as Oreglia, Di Giovanni, and Calori Cesis, sometimes to correct them. Delivering on his book’s title, he provided a more serious treatment of Pico’s Kabbalah than anything e­ arlier.29 Massetani thought of the Italian Re­nais­sance as animated by semipagan Neoplatonic syncretism, which tempted Pico to harmonize Kabbalah with Chris­tian­ity. Within Kabbalah Massetani found allegory, symbolism, anthropomorphic theology, and a h ierarchical ontology of emanation. This was a pantheist Kabbalah, though a transcendent God attenuated the pantheism. ­Because Massetani relied on seventeenth-­ and eighteenth-­ century sources, he was sometimes misinformed about Kabbalah. Remarkably, he saw it as a kind of “rationalism (at least in part) applied to interpreting the books of the Bible.” Even though Pico had been a g ood Christian, this rationalism incited critics to attack his Kabbalah for putting reason ahead of faith. Massetani located Christianized Kabbalah mainly in the Conclusions and Heptaplus, dividing it into a t heology, a cosmology, and an anthropology. The analy­sis is crude and schematic, but not without textual support.30 From Adolphe Franck, whose study of Kabbalah appeared in 1843, Massetani learned that the anthropomorphic God of the Kabbalists exalted ­humans as microcosms of a cosmic Adam. In his chapter on anthropology, he concluded that this was also Pico’s view and that his conception of the ­human soul was Kabbalist, as shown not just by the Heptaplus but also by the Oration. He summarized the lines near the beginning of the speech that Pico imputed to the Creator, who tells Adam that he is ­free ­because he



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has no fixed nature. Massetani also cited the (now) celebrated words from the Oration: “Man is a g­ reat miracle, Asclepius.”31 In 1859, however, Berti had ignored the h ­ uman miracle and its dignity. In 1883 Oreglia mentioned only the title of the Oration, saying nothing about its content. As participants in the 1894 memorial searched for reasons to praise Pico, none both­ered with the speech. Molinari never mentioned it. Ceretti made two lists of the prince’s writings but skipped the Oration in both. Di Giovanni consigned it to the minor works and belittled it. It was Massetani—­while explicating Pico’s Kabbalah—­who first introduced Italians to Pico’s speech as a p ositive entry in his dossier. When Giovanni Gentile reviewed Massetani’s Filosofia cabbalistica a year ­after it was published, this was the state of play: at the turn of the c­ entury, Italians knew Pico best as the patriarch of Christian Kabbalah, not as a prophet of ­human dignity.32

4. ​Gentile’s Pico In 1916 the hinges of history creaked again when Gentile launched Pico’s twentieth-­century ­career with his article—­often expanded and reprinted—­ “The Concept of Man in the Re­nais­sance.” He did not mention Massetani’s book, though he had reviewed it in 1898, preferring it then to the “two works on this topic that have been available up to now, one by F ­ ather Giuseppe Oreglia and the other by Professor Di Giovanni.” Nonetheless, Gentile’s 1916 article cited Oreglia, who despised Pico’s Christian Kabbalah—­though not Massetani, who was sympathetic—­and the reference to Oreglia survived several revisions of the article to stand in Gentile’s collected works of 1940.33 Both Massetani’s study and Di Giovanni’s w ­ ere more ambitious than most contributions to the 1894 Pico festivities. But in 1922 Gentile de­cided that a dif­fer­ent book was the “first on Pico available to us that is readable.” This was Giovanni Semprini’s Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Phoenix of Geniuses, published in 1921 “at the sign of the Crown of the Magi, by the publishing h ­ ouse ‘Atanor.’ ” According to Gentile, Semprini’s book was a good read but could not be taken seriously. The author had “the mind of a mystic,” full of vague religious sentiments. As for the book, “whoever reads it looking for the promised exposure of so-­called ‘secrets’—­Kabbalist, magical or astrological—is headed for total disappointment. . . . ​No secret is actually uncovered, the reason being that Pico’s teaching contained none.”

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Gentile’s verdict was that Semprini produced nothing more than an occultist personality study that missed the point about Pico: “Look, for example, at the three pages dedicated to the Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has always held the attention of students of the Re­nais­sance as one of the most outstanding documents on that exaltation of man which was characteristic of the era.”34 As Gentile said, Semprini’s 1921 volume (­later expanded and revised) is a smooth but shallow life-­and-­works with plenty of gossip and local color but not much evidence or substance. Although his readers got l­ ittle help with Kabbalah, Semprini called it the key to Pico’s hidden doctrine. Unlike Gentile, he recognized the prince’s rule of secrecy, though the secrets eluded him. He described Kabbalah as an ineff able spiritual musicality, an inaudible harmony that helped Pico keep his thinking in tune amid torments that made his last somber years unlike the days when he had been the very model—as Semprini wrote—of the “­eager and combative” Italian race. Pico listened for soundless rhythms in Kabbalah to ­settle his anx­i­ eties, and he analyzed them with an “art of numbering.”35 As for the Oration, Gentile was right that Semprini’s treatment, while echoing Burckhardt, is slight and superficial, just a string of quotations in a flimsy précis of the start of the speech. To supply what Semprini failed to grasp about the speech, Gentile cited himself: he directed readers to the expansion of his 1916 article in the first (1920) edition of Giordano Bruno and Re­nais­sance ἀ ought. Plainly, Semprini had not done his homework by 1921, since he failed to find praise of h ­ uman dignity where Gentile located it—­with Pico at the center of “all humanism.” Lacking that insight, Semprini made no advance—­according to Gentile—on the German studies that antedated Berti and Burckhardt.36 Gentile’s intense but lightly documented article—­his antidote to Semprini—­dealt mainly with Manetti and Campanella. Besides Burckhardt and his own Vico Studies of 1915, Gentile cited only Oreglia and three other students of Pico in the original 1916 version. The 1920 expansion added Massetani. The 1925 reprint added nothing. But the final version of 1940 mentioned another contribution on the patristic roots and l­ater fortunes of dignitas: the young Eugenio Garin had published it in 1938. Gentile cited Garin’s new article—­also his 1937 book on Pico—as evidence that the notion of ­human dignity grew in significance ­after the patristic era, thus confirming that “even a­ fter new studies, t­ hese pages of mine [Gentile’s] of more than twenty years ago ‘retain their full value t­ oday.’ ”37



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Garin said less than what Gentile implied by repeating his words out of context, and this “full value” lacked the extensive documentation on Pico supplied by Garin’s book: the older phi­los­o­pher was expressing an outdated assessment of the state of Italian scholarship on the prince. Moreover, the other comprehensive studies that he cited or in any way recommended—­those by Oreglia, Massetani, and Semprini—­deal entirely or mainly with Kabbalah: this despite Gentile’s claim that a pa ean to ­human dignity in the Oration had first claim on “the attention of students of the Re­nais­sance.” Even more striking is Gentile’s silence about Eugenio Anagnine’s new book on Pico. Anagnine’s study (to be discussed shortly) was published by Gentile’s former friend, Giovanni Laterza, seven months before Garin’s volume.38 ­After World War I, as Gentile was reworking his “Concept of Man,” he spoke with enormous authority. Since what Italians could read in Italian at that time presented Pico as an expert on Kabbalah, why did Gentile turn the prince into something ­else, a champion of ­human dignity? Clues from Massetani, Semprini, Burckhardt, and Bertrando Spaventa ­were available to him. He had reviewed Massetani in 1898, but he could not have read Semprini ­until 1921, ­after his 1916 article had already gone through its first expansion. Spaventa and Burckhardt had been accessible—­though in dif­ fer­ent ways—­since 1860. Modern German philosophy also took root in Italy around that time, when Spaventa emerged as the new nation’s chief Hegelian.39 Po­liti­cal turmoil ­after 1848 unsettled Spaventa’s life as a p hi­los­o­pher ­until his c­ areer took off in the excitement about nationalism. When several quick university appointments caused him to draft and redraft the inaugural speech (prolusione) that was customary for new professors, he used the occasions to celebrate the “glorious phalanx of f­ ree thought” that led to the heroism of Bruno and Campanella and then onward to modern Italian philosophy. Although Spaventa discussed h ­ uman dignity in the first version of his address, written for delivery in 1860, Pico was not yet on his roster of Italian thinkers who prepared modern ideas for transmission through Descartes and Kant and then brought them back to Italy in his own ­century.40 By 1862, however, in an extended version of the address, Pico made Spaventa’s list in the com­pany of Ficino, one of “the Platonists and theosophists who supports religious toleration. The only way to bring phi­los­ o­phers back to a f aith that they do not believe in is for this to be good

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philosophy, not preaching. Ficino exalts h ­ uman dignity: by honoring God we honor ourselves b ­ ecause in ourselves we recognize the divine dignity. We know God by way of the divine in us, and not other­wise. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola sees no other way except by revelation to understand the mystery of nature. . . . ​He exalts the dignity of man even more than Ficino.” To support this claim, Spaventa cited the same passage of the Oration that Burckhardt had used two years ­earlier, along with a few lines from the Heptaplus.41 The page or so that Spaventa gave to Pico has ­little resonance now ­because Burckhardt’s version of Pico—­and Spaventa’s and then Gentile’s and Garin’s—­has long been the standard. Since the Oration was all but invisible to Italians before 1860, however, the likelihood is that Spaventa found it elsewhere, prob­ably by keeping himself up-­to-­date on philosophical lit­er­a­ture in German. To study Hegel, he had to read other German thinkers—­like Burckhardt, who may have moved him to formulate the brief account of Pico that Gentile would eventually accept, enlarge, and pass on to Garin. Gentile’s 1916 article on the concept of man, which provides so ­little documentation on Pico, opens with an epigram from Burckhardt in the Italian translation of 1876: “This achievement alone would be enough to oblige us to give eternal recognition to the p ­ eople of the Re­nais­sance.” The “achievement” is “knowing h ­ umans and humankind in their deeper nature,” not just as constructs of logic. ­Later Gentile cited Burckhardt again on “­human valor and value as the Spirit’s value facing nature” and on “knowing as a constructive activity,” but also on the misleading title given to the Oration by editors. Clearly, Burckhardt’s Pico was on his mind by 1916. As for Spaventa, no one knew more about him than Gentile, who derived his own ‘­actual idealism’ from Spaventa’s Hegelianism. Gentile’s three-­volume edition of Spaventa’s works—­including the prolusione cited above—­still grounds our understanding of Italy’s pioneering Hegelian.42

5. ​Garin’s Pico Pico’s Italian genealogy as a prophet of dignity started with Spaventa and Massetani and then passed through Gentile to Garin, who was still talking about Pico in the 1990s. In 1937, when Garin published his durable book on the prince, the Fascists still ruled Italy, and Gentile—­doggedly opposed



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by Benedetto Croce—­presided over a new Italian culture that he no longer governed, as he had in the 1920s as a minister of Mussolini’s regime and the designer of power­ful Fascist institutions. Perhaps ­because he was so serious about life and philosophy, Gentile saw his power decline as the Fascist thugs, who had always been opportunist and violent, turned more arbitrary and vicious—­most despicably with the racial laws of the late 1930s. In this climate, Gentile protected Paul Kristeller and other Jews who had fled Germany, though he never renounced Fascism.43 Garin, whose first full university appointment came ­after the war, also had Gentile’s support and claimed his intellectual legacy. The g­ rand narrative of Italian philosophy is still Gentile’s as Garin enriched and refined it. For Gentile, the story peaked in the nineteenth ­century, when the idealism that blossomed a­ fter Spaventa could be traced back to Antonio Rosmini and Vincenzo Gioberti—­the subjects of Gentile’s doctoral thesis at Pisa—­ and then forward through Francesco Fiorentino to Donato Jaja, Gentile’s teacher. Garin, despite his knowledge of this con­temporary philosophy, began with research on the Enlightenment before settling on the Re­nais­ sance. A first book about Pico was a natu­ral step, once Gentile had called attention to the Oration. Gentile welcomed the book as a “real joy” as soon as it was published.44 Two other studies of Pico had appeared in Italy shortly before: a second eff ort by Semprini and Anagnine’s Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Philosophical-­Religious Syncretism. Semprini’s 1936 book, like its ancestor of 1921, as well as Anagnine’s far stronger work, are largely continuous in subject m ­ atter—­though not in their conclusions—­with what Oreglia, Di Giovanni, and Massetani had written. When Garin departed from this older Italian approach to Pico—­where Kabbalah was central—­the move made his c­ areer. Devaluing Kabbalah made room for Gentile’s ideology of dignity and humanism, although this was not Garin’s intention.45 His treatment of Kabbalah was saner than Oreglia’s and clearer than Massetani’s or Semprini’s—­perhaps ­because he was less involved in the topic. Like Massetani, he described Kabbalah as rationalist—­though not just rationalist. By Christian standards, it was also arcane. The strangeness helped Pico think unconventionally about God, just as magic gave him a novel way of dealing with nature. When Pico’s theory of magic led to a practice, “it was to actualize the regnum hominis, the lordship of man, the dominion of the sage.” Although Garin dealt with the larger compass of Pico’s occultism more persuasively than anyone before him, he sold Kabbalah

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short, finding it incidental to the message of the Heptaplus and less relevant than the Hermetica to Pico’s world-­engaging magic. He returned to Kabbalah in 1942 while digesting the prince’s ideas for an anthology of Quattrocento philosophy. “Pico never accepted from the Kabbalists as much of the par­tic­u­lar as animated their own systems,” he claimed, demoting their secrets to an allegorical “attitude” that might solve prob­lems of Christian theology. The Kabbalah advertised in 119 of the 900 Conclusions is all about particulars, however, though before Chaim Wirszubski tracked them down much l­ater, they could not be studied in detail. Garin gave more than a tenth of his 1942 anthology to Pico’s writings, and yet he found room for none of the 900 Conclusions, thus bypassing most of Pico’s statements about Kabbalah. In the two paragraphs from the Apology that Garin included, the prince jeered at critics who mistook Cabala for the name of some “treacherous and dev­ilish person.” 46 Top billing in the anthology went to the Oration, “a thrilling hymn to man’s cosmic greatness,” singing about a “­whole universe that . . . ​contains deep inside a life made not only explicit by man but exalted.” This lord of creation rules a domain “centered on the ­human mind and mastered by it.” As in Garin’s 1937 book, this realm was a regnum hominis—­a ‘Kingdom of Man’ inspired by Francis Bacon and invoked by Gentile at the end of his 1916 article. Gentile had taken care to distinguish Bacon’s view from Manetti’s and Campanella’s—or Pico’s, by implication—on “man’s privileged position, still a Kingdom by the grace of God that directly confers on man the use both of natu­ral and of super­natural powers, a Kingdom where we begin to catch a glimpse of creative and autonomous h ­ uman initiative.” But the Pico of this brave new world was Gentile’s ideological construct, not the historical person—as a reading of the ­whole Oration, not just its dithyrambic prologue, ­will show. And the latent ideology was Gentile’s actualism, vis­i­ble in Garin’s book.47 “The deep living force in Pico’s thinking,” according to Garin, “is the claim that the meaning of the ­human Spirit is infinite, divine ­because it is intelligent, . . . ​rooted in God, f­ ree from e­ very bond of nature and craft, . . . ​ activating the power released in the world.” Summing up, on the final page of his book he described Pico as the last thinker of the fifteenth c­ entury, tormented by the discomfort of ad ­ ying era, troubled by prob­lems of an age being born, manifesting in himself, more than anyone e­ lse, the soul of the Italian Re­nais­sance,



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whose aspirations rather than any systematic products he brings back to life. Too conscious of the values of medieval thought . . . ​and too acute in grasping the defects of contemporaries, he theorized a s tate of mind when he raised his voice in an astonishing new hymn to man’s unfulfilled infinity. He experimented with the power of the Spirit that is never content, the strug­gle between what is and what needs to be realized, and from that experience he took the theme that celebrates h ­ uman dignity. Hints, longings, unmet needs for awareness: this is what we find in him, along with ­great faith in the ­human Spirit, in the search for reason, as well as a deep religious feeling that proj­ects all of real­ity on to a plane of eternal values.

­ ese elastic sentences and invocations of the Spirit had enormous appeal Th in a period when idealist Philosophies of the Spirit—in Croce’s version as well Gentile’s—­were still the fuel of Italian thought and culture. They come from a work that never fully satisfied its author—­“an interpretation of whose limits I am so much convinced,” he wrote half a c­ entury ­later, “that I have never wanted to republish that book from t­ hose times.” 48

6. ​Gentile’s Pico Again Like Garin’s prose, Gentile’s ideas are sometimes elusive, and they are still controversial. His “Concept of Man” article shows a way into them. A key point is that Re­nais­sance thinkers based new values on old authorities—­the classics. While the ordinary h ­ uman experience of physical weakness had made the ancients pessimistic, Manetti and Campanella ­were optimists: they thought that mortals feeble by nature could grow strong by overcoming nature. ­Humans, endowed by God with mind (or Spirit), could prevail over the nature in which the Spirit was imperfectly immanent. The embodied h ­ uman mind was the distinctly ­human state of nature, which Christians hope to transcend by God’s grace. For Gentile, this was a well-­meant but impaired naturalism. Naturalism still limped in Quattrocento humanism, hauling God’s luggage—­the burden of a d ivinity not fully immanent ­because the act of creation that sanctifies nature also transcends it.49 Before God made Adam, nature had no mind or Spirit in it. U ­ ntil mind and ­will entered with mankind, nature was just so much machinery, devoid of Spirit. Thus, when God gave Adam no nature at all, according to Gentile’s reading of Pico’s Oration, the real gift was freedom—­freedom for

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man to create himself in order to escape natu­ral necessity. The Spirit that stirs in God and man alike is not static or contemplative, not the rigid Greek abstraction locked in conflict with nature. In Pico’s “Christian idealism,” the Spirit is a divine and creative agent, and “true real­ity is the work of the Spirit itself.”50 The notion that real­ity is the work of the Spirit—­that “the rational is the real and the real is the rational,” in Hegel’s aphorism—­had a long c­ areer in German philosophy before Gentile and Croce inherited it from Spaventa. In Gentile’s idealism, sometimes called ‘immanent idealism,’ the Spirit is immanent in the world. He traced this doctrine to Pico’s Oration, reading the speech as a charter not of Re­nais­sance idealism as usually conceived—­a species of Platonism—­but of an incipiently naturalist idealism still shackled by God’s transcendence.51 Experts on Gentile debate the place of his philosophy in his politics—­a sensitive topic b ­ ecause the greatest historian of Italian philosophy, and Italy’s best phi­los­o­pher in his own day, was also a minister of the Fascist regime. Since Gentile was so serious about life and philosophy—­and since serious philosophy becomes, in some degree, a way of life—it seems implausible that this power­ful thinker’s politics was not, to some extent, s­ haped by his philosophy. In that case, if Gentile’s (and hence Garin’s) version of Pico on dignity was formed by Gentile’s philosophy, and if this Pico became our Pico, does our Pico owe anything to Fascism?52 Fitting Gentile’s Pico for a black shirt would be hard. His Pico was born in 1916, before the war ended, before Mussolini reached the national stage, and well before Gentile himself became a Fascist and split with Croce, the ­future liberal who had been his intellectual partner since 1902. Moreover, the cloak of immanent idealism that Gentile draped around Pico was too roomy to suit any one line of politics. Nonetheless, b ­ ecause Italian discussions of Pico had been drenched in ideology since Oreglia first tied him to the blood libel, Gentile’s ideology also seems germane, all the more ­because he had so much to do with Pico’s fortunes in the twentieth c­ entury.

7. ​Anagnine’s Pico As Garin’s patron, Gentile promoted the book on Pico that still defines its subject. He also picked Garin to succeed him as Italy’s official historian of philosophy, and his successor’s triumphs ­after World War II secured the Pico book’s position: from that time on, it was the author who made the



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book, not the reverse. Garin’s im­mense achievement surely justifies Gentile’s patronage and confirms his judgment. But what about Anagnine’s book on Pico? Why did Gentile ignore it when he promoted Garin’s? Why was Anagnine’s study savagely reviewed by one of Gentile’s janissaries—­ Giuseppe Saitta—­immediately ­after publication? And why did Ernst Cassirer leave Anagnine in Garin’s shadow? Reviewing “the most recent Pico lit­er­a­ture”—­with no mention of Gentile or Semprini—­Cassirer observed in 1942 that “in recent years two works have appeared, one by Eugenio Garin, the other by Eugenio Anagnine.” Both show “the eff ect which the Cabbala had on Pico’s mind,” but only Garin’s book “marks an impor­tant step in advance.”53 De­cades ­later Garin recorded his encounters with other intellectuals, including Croce as editor of Italy’s most power­ful journal of opinion: “In 1937, I had a volume of mine on Pico . . . ​sent to La Critica. In the same year, a review by Guido De Ruggiero of Eugenio Anagnine’s monograph on Pico—­published by Laterza—­appeared in La Critica without the least whisper of my poor book (although Cassirer and Kristeller would discuss it fully). At the time, even though the silence hurt me, I c onfess that I attributed it to the way I work,” suggesting that the book’s cultural mise-­ en-­scène was too thin to please the lordly Croce, whose likes and dislikes ­were Olympian, as Norberto Bobbio observed: “Anything new in the air, and ten pages of summary condemnation in La Critica would make the air fit to breathe again.” Bobbio—­a po­liti­cally engaged phi­los­o­pher in the Italian way—­made this remark while describing De Ruggiero’s bulky History of Philosophy as Croce’s message multiplied by thirteen in that many volumes, whose author “takes upon himself the thankless task of a fearless gravedigger. His History . . . ​was a s tring of miscarriages,” says Bobbio, “justly interrupted and sagaciously punished by the Providence of History, while we awaited the splendid era of Italian idealism.”54 Sides w ­ ere always already chosen, willy-­nilly: this was the environment for new thinking in the Italy of 1937, when Garin himself thought well of Anagnine’s Sincretismo. He had finished his own Vita e dottrina early in 1934, when Anagnine was already publishing articles on Pico. But Garin’s book was not printed ­until October of 1937, months ­after Anagnine’s. In his preface, Garin noted that “vari­ous essays” had appeared since 1934, “as well as a full volume”—­meaning Semprini’s 1936 revision. His bibliography also acknowledged Anagnine’s results, “by which vari­ous questions are handled insightfully and appropriately.” But timing prevented Garin

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from ­doing much with Semprini’s new book or Anagnine’s. Of the latter he wrote that he was “unable to use it as I would have wished.”55 Saitta was less gracious, mocking Anagnine as “an historian new to our Re­nais­sance” and a “ literary scholar”—­hence no phi­los­o­pher. “­Here in Italy we prefer Semprini’s modest studies to this book of his. Anagnine must be very young,” he assumed, “other­w ise vari­ous exuberances and a  sort of artlessness would have no explanation.” In fact, Anagnine—­ Evgeny Arkedevitch Ananin—­was nearly fifty at the time, only seven years younger than Saitta and more seasoned by politics. A ­ fter the Menshevik collapse of 1905  in Rus­sia, he had fled to France and then Italy, ­going on to a d istinguished c­ areer of teaching and writing in Geneva, Milan, Nice, and eventually Venice, where his main—­but not only—­ interest was the M ­ iddle Ages. ­After his remarkable book on Pico, he turned to Fra Dolcino—­a radical reformer before his time who was burned in 1307—­and also to the medieval idea of rebirth and to modern Rus­sian lit­er­a­ture. He and other exiles also started a Rus­sian institute in Milan.56 On February 6, 1937, a copy of Anagnine’s Pico book was delivered to the Prefettura in Bari, then stamped and marked as received (Figure 5). The initials ‘GL’ cut into its final pages identify it as a copy reserved for such uses by the publisher—­Giovanni Laterza. On February 13 the Prefettura signed it as “authorized for distribution.” But not all new Laterza titles fared as well during this period: in 1938 twenty-­two w ­ ere confiscated. A few years l­ater, Laterza’s son was imprisoned. Times w ­ ere hard for the few publishers who defied the regime, and in the world of books no defiance went deeper than Laterza’s unflinching support for Croce, ­going back to the turn of the ­century. Laterza had also been Gentile’s publisher—­until he declined to ­handle the Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana that Gentile launched in 1920 to declare his in­de­ pen­dence from La Critica, the journal founded by him and Croce to advance their alliance. When Anagnine’s book appeared, its Laterza imprint was a po­liti­cal statement. The date on the cover and title page is 1937, with no indication of the Fascist year, which was xv , as shown at the front of Garin’s book, dated mc mx x xv ii–­x v. This was the choice of Garin’s publisher, Felice le Monnier, an old Florentine firm that had recently found new markets by publishing schoolbooks aligned with Gentile’s reform of the Italian educational system. Gentile himself had been Le Monnier’s titular president since 1932.57



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Anagnine divided his book into four chapters and a conclusion, des­crib­ ing Paduan Averroism, scholastic theology, Kabbalah, and Platonism as  the main currents ­r unning through Pico’s work, especially the 900 Conclusions—­which no one before Anagnine came close to understanding. The book’s subtitle—­Sincretismo religioso-­filosofico—­declares its main finding, which should have surprised no reader of the Italian lit­er­a­ture on Pico between Berti and the early Semprini. In the preface Anagnine thanks Umberto Cassuto and Gershom Scholem, saying that their “special competence on Oriental issues was very useful to me in preparing my chapter on Kabbalah.”58 As Anagnine told the story, Pico’s teachers at Padua w ­ ere Nicoletto Vernia and Elia del M edigo—­a Christian and a J ew and both doctrinaire Averroists. Never himself a hard-­liner on Averroism, Pico also never shared the widespread loathing for the g­ reat Commentator. “Pico is a type of ‘anachronism,’ ” wrote Anagnine, “a ‘rare bird’ among Quattrocento humanists, who ­were mainly indiff erent to the ­great prob­lems of medieval scholasticism.” He explored technical prob­lems in theology ignored by ­others, and he respected the skills and style of medieval thinkers, while often taking unconventional positions on sensitive points of doctrine. Although the Church considered Origen a heretic, for example, his damnation or salvation was an open question for Pico, who admired the ­great Hebraist not only for his mind but also for “his chaste and pure life, . . . ​his heroic tenacity . . . ​in scorning ‘not one death but a thousand.’ ” Pico may have seen himself in this tortured genius, but for Anagnine the young prince was “neither a reformer nor a t rue and proper innovator in theology. . . . ​He said nothing . . . ​essentially dif­fer­ent from what had already been stated and professed by a number of masters of late scholasticism.”59 Pico’s theology was an extension of medieval doctrine, though he enriched the tradition with resources unknown to the scholastics. “The seed of Ficino’s syncretism fell on very fertile ground,” wrote Anagnine, and “the key that Pico used to open up the abstruse teachings of Kabbalah was given to him by Plotinus and Proclus.” Kabbalah fascinated him not only as confirming the Church’s greatest teachers but also as verifying ancient pagan wisdom, especially from Plato and Pythagoras, which was also Christian at heart. Nearly half of Anagnine’s book is about Kabbalah, 127 much fuller pages than the 34 that Garin gave to the same topic. The ­handling of Hebrew and of rabbinical sources and Kabbalist texts is impressive—­

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Figure 5.  The Bari Prefettura’s stamp on Anagnine’s book, 1937.



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astounding, actually, in Italy of the 1930s for anyone but a learned Jew. The resulting analy­sis of Pico’s Kabbalist Conclusions was the best before Wirszubski’s masterpiece of 1989. Through old secondary accounts, Anagnine knew the translations made by Flavius Mithridates to tutor Pico in Kabbalah. He identified Flavius and Yohanan Alemanno as the prince’s Jewish teachers; he read the Conclusions as evidence of a prodigious self-­ education in Kabbalah; and he praised Pico’s pioneering studies of Judaica and the Hebrew language.60 In the midst of this exposition of Kabbalah came Anagnine’s account of the Oration, which ultimately he dismissed as a “short speech, a piece of eloquence and—­I would say—­cleverness.” His words drew Saitta’s fire as “contrary to the learned consensus, foreign as well as Italian,” and blind to Pico’s “original thinking, which for three-­fourths of the book is reduced to sources of Kabbalah—­Hebrew and Christian.” In fact, Anagnine cited one of the Kabbalist Conclusions to introduce the Oration: “When the soul grasps what­ever it can grasp and is joined to a higher soul, it w ­ ill rub off its earthly covering and ­will be rooted up from its place and joined with divinity.” Anagnine commented: “Thus stripping off its earthly ‘garments,’ the h ­ uman soul rejoins the divine majesty and light by steps of ascent, as its contemplation rises to a peak of mystical Plotinian ecstasy. This is surely a clear outline of the doctrine of Man professed by Pico, in conformity with Kabbalist anthropology, and developed by him not only in some of the Conclusions but also and extensively in his treatise De hominis dignitate . . . ​, whose doctrine of Man is genuinely, if not exclusively, Kabbalist.” Pico’s anthropology in the Oration, in other words, is a t heory of the ­human condition whose corresponding practice is an ascetic and mystical regimen of disembodiment. Such a theory is starkly incompatible with any post-­Kantian conception of ­human freedom and dignity. But Anagnine’s ideological commitments, as expressed in his Pico book, seem to be Christian and neoscholastic, not actualist and neo-­Hegelian, like Gentile’s. Accordingly, he found the world-­denying discipline of the Oration entirely compatible with related aphorisms from the Conclusions, like the thesis that exhorts the embodied ­human person to “rub off its earthly covering” in order to deracinate and divinize itself.61 Although Pico wrote the Oration to introduce the Conclusions, that basic fact (­until Wirszubski’s breakthrough) had l­ ittle bearing on modern interpretations of the speech, once Burckhardt had detached it from its



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matrix of quodlibetal scholasticism. Anagnine remade the connection and thus made Pico’s proj­ect a ­little more intelligible. But his timing was bad. His book was published just as the Fascist Ministry of Popu­lar Culture was trying to catch up with the Nazis by launching a new program, La Bonifica della Cultura in Italia. Targets of this ‘reclamation’ ­were “pacifism, internationalism, communism, and masonry, headed by Jews and Judaizers.” 62 The omens ­were not good for a book by a leftist foreigner about a Jewish tradition that still scandalized most Jews—­more than two centuries ­after the shame of Shabbetai Zevi but before Gershom Scholem explained it. To make ­matters worse, Gentile had already enlisted Pico as a gonfaloniere of proto-­actualism. A P ico who put Jewish superstition at the heart of his thought, who did not treat Kabbalah as an arcane delusion, was an incon­ ve­nient prince—­likewise an Oration read continuously with the Kabbalist Conclusions. One remedy was to promote a b ook—­Garin’s—­that transported the author to Gentile’s actualist Kingdom of Man (regnum hominis) and distanced him from the arcana explored by Anagnine. To be sure, reclaiming Pico from Jews and Judaizers was not Garin’s proj­ect: his book includes a c hapter on “Revelation and Kabbalah” and another on Pico’s Kabbalist sources. But Anagnine’s more extensive study of Kabbalah was a con­spic­u­ous target in 1937, when the ringmasters of Fascist culture ­were about to appropriate Pico.63 Meanwhile, one Italian phi­los­o­pher who learned from Anagnine was Saitta, Gentile’s student and an early adopter of Fascism. In 1925—­the year of Gentile’s “Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals” and two years ­after he published his apprentice’s book on Ficino—­Saitta had founded New Life: An Illustrated Fortnightly Review of the Fascist University of Bologna. ­Later, during the war, he was busy with a ponderous study—1,300 pages—of Italian ἀ ought in Humanism and the Re­nais­sance; when the first volume appeared in 1949, he was still teaching at Bologna, and he dedicated his work to Gentile.64 Having reviewed Anagnine’s book in 1937, Saitta had to agree that Pico’s engagement with Kabbalah was “intense.” Yet it was also “naive,” he claimed. ­Because this ardent young man could not break the “spell” of this “strange concoction,” he lost track of his true philosophical destiny: immanent idealism. Distracted by “euphoria” and “enthusiasm,” he “indulged himself with Kabbalah only ­because he was deluded, seeing what was not t­ here.”

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Beyond or beneath such fantasies, however, Pico’s “real thinking” was evident, and it “outweighed Kabbalistic ideas by far.” Pico’s interest in them was subsidiary: they w ­ ere just devices for constructing a concept of religion grounded in the philosophy that was familiar to Saitta. Kabbalah itself, by contrast, was no path to the “living heart” of Pico’s thought; the right road, with Saitta directing traffic, ran through the usual neighborhoods of cosmology, epistemology, ethics, ontology, psy­chol­ogy, and theodicy. Treating Pico as a conventional, if erratic, Christian thinker was the only way to situate his “religion of liberty” correctly—­within Gentile’s Kingdom of Man. For Pico, as evaluated by Saitta, this actualist realm was the site of mankind’s “astonishing pro­gress” ­toward self-­realization. Although the prince tried to “found a Kingdom of Man,” he stayed trapped in a “sense of mystery and marvel.” Unlike Anagnine, Saitta himself made no pro­gress t­ oward understanding Pico’s encounter with Kabbalah. Dismissing “all the gadgetry,” he could not take Jewish secrets seriously enough to study them closely. In Italy during the ventennio, his response to this rebarbative subject, still unintelligible to most Christians, was closer to the norm than Anagnine’s. Nonetheless, Saitta would have done well to remember Pico’s warning in the Oration about opponents of Kabbalah who “denounce and detest what they do not understand.” 65

8. ​Papini’s Kingdom In 1939, before answering Saitta’s attack with graceful sarcasm, Anagnine had already dismissed Papini’s ramblings about the Re­nais­sance: “Critical history has nothing to do with this gaudy scenario.” But Papini commanded an audience, and if Pico was to be a po­liti­cal icon, relevant to the latest bonificazione, he would need a demotic voice. The Oration’s Latin—­ oratorical, mandarin, and inaccessible—­would eventually be opened up in translation by Garin, a gifted stylist. Introducing a new edition of his version in 1994, he spoke with Mosaic authority about a topic owned by him for de­cades. A footnote acknowledged recent work on Pico’s Kabbalah by Chaim Wirszubski, Moshe Idel, and o ­ thers, but the focus of the introduction stayed where it was in his 1937 book, though the highlights had shifted from actualism to existentialism: “Man is the one that makes himself freely; he is a f­ ree act of choice. . . . ​­Free at the center of the total framework of being, man can choose his own existence, his own determination. . . . ​



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The Oration has affirmed the centrality of man along with his problematic character.” Garin traced this self-­made ­human to the Hermetica but made no such connection with Kabbalah. He noticed Pico’s “enthusiasms” for Kabbalah, “oriental languages” and “ ‘oriental’ citations,” but exotic erudition was as far as it went. Although Pico wanted to apply his alien wisdom in “new spiritual encounters among ­humans,” we are not told how such encounters might—or might not—­have qualified as Kabbalist.66 Garin’s Italian version of the speech came late in a w ave of modern translations that followed a German rendering in 1905. The first try in Italian was Semprini’s in 1936—­a tardy start for so famous a text—­and Semprini’s eff ort was promptly denounced by Piero Marrucchi, whose nom de mystère was Peter the Hermit. Associated with a t heosophical Biblioteca Filosofica, this ardent Christian Platonist impressed the young Garin. Marrucchi’s review of Semprini cleared the way for a new version in 1941 by Bruno Cicognani, a novelist and playwright who campaigned with the Fascists to replace lei with voi in order to revive the “spirit of the race.” One of Cicognani’s footnotes cites Anagnine with appreciation—­after the “fine and exhaustive study” by Garin. Cicognani’s statement of the Oration’s thesis is that “God created man to be his own creator,” and the soul of the speech is the “exaltation and realization of ‘­human dignity.’ ” He lists “Hebrew theology” as one of many doctrines that fascinated Pico, but Kabbalah failed to impress the prince, as far as one can tell from the translator’s introduction. This loud silence about Kabbalah contrasts with fine print in the footnotes, which rec­ord insights into Pico’s Hebrew learning.67 The first volume of La Rinascita, the journal of Papini’s new Centro Nazionale, carried Marrucchi’s dismissal of Semprini. Papini moved quickly to replace the damaged goods with Cicognani’s version, which became the first volume of the Center’s Biblioteca della Rinascita, where Papini himself would ­later ruminate on Pico and Yorick. By the time the new Center was authorized and Le Monnier was publishing its journal and monograph series, Papini had been gelded by Fascist honors. But the ‘spent man’ was not quite spent.68 At first glance, his collection of essays on the Re­nais­sance, Imitating the ­Father, seems completely forgettable, just occasional pieces—he wrote them incessantly—­glued between covers by Le Monnier. But the book’s odd title was bait, luring readers to ask what imitating the F ­ ather had to do with the Re­nais­sance. By w ay of a verse from Matthew’s Gospel, Papini alluded to a t heory of history that preferred the Re­nais­sance to modern

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times and the ­Middle Ages. Ardengo Soffici, an old ally from the avant-­ garde, supplied anti-­medieval ammunition. Christian art of that period was degenerate, Soffici charged, a “bastardizing and Levantine contamination of the Greek and Roman” that was “too steeped in Judaism and too anti-­Roman not to be a bit un-­human.” Only ­later, when Christian Eu­rope rediscovered “its own Roman heart,” would “humanism and a R e­nais­ sance become a single ­whole.” Papini published Soffici’s ugly nonsense in the Center’s journal.69 Some of Papini’s fakery was Fascist propaganda as crude as Soffici’s. Foreign influences had been Italy’s ruin, he complained. But recent infections came ­after the Re­nais­sance, whose warlike spirit still sang in immortal epics by Petrarch and Tasso, bards of Italian triumphs in Africa. (By the time Papini’s book was in print, the British had restored Haile Selassie, and Africa Orientale was no longer Italiana.) ­Earlier, before the Re­nais­sance, “oriental asceticism was brought into Eu­rope by a monasticism of African origin that distorts the fine harmony of au­then­tic Chris­tian­ity—of what might be called ‘classical.’ ” The mission of the Re­nais­sance was to restore the lost harmony—to “rediscover its center of equilibrium,” as Soffici had said—by emulating it. With three eternal rhythms of history to choose from—­unitive, titanic, and imitative—­medieval and modern cultures went off cadence with the first two, but the Re­nais­sance got the imitative beat just right. The other two eras divided what ­ought to be united, but the Re­nais­sance bonded again with Italy’s glorious past.70 Harmonies revived by the Re­nais­sance reconnected “the dignity of Man with the sublimity of God,” turning from emulation of the crucified Redeemer to imitating the Creator—­hence Imitating the F ­ ather. In Papini’s words, “­after the Imitation of Christ that reaffirms monastic asceticism comes the Dignity of Man and Pico’s proclamation of the demolished rights of man.” Throughout this l­ ittle volume, ‘freedom and dignity’ is an incantation, proclaiming “mastery of nature and man’s power over the world” as well as “aspiration for omnisapience and omnipotence, . . . ​which is a basic feature of the Renaissance”—­according to Papini. “In the ­Middle Ages man was almost nullified before God,” he declared, and “in the modern era God is almost eliminated in relation to man. In the Re­nais­sance man turns ­toward God, having regained his divine and earthly dignity, becoming, in some sense, God’s collaborator.” If ‘freedom and dignity’ was the signal phrase of the Re­nais­sance, ‘annihilation’ was the medieval motto, labeling an age when “ideal ­human life



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was reduced to gradual suppression of the self.” The Re­nais­sance found a Christian cure for this withering disease in the theology of incarnation, which was “not only a redemption from sin but also . . . ​an enlargement of the form and dignity of man.”71 Papini’s gimcrack theory of history, with its contrivance of ­human freedom and dignity, shows what was on his mind when he brandished Pico’s skull as an emblem of audacity and insatiable intellect. The scope of this misunderstanding—in just a few pages—­was worthy of an aging athlete of extravagance in the last miserable years of the ventennio. Pico had not the least notion of the “rights of man.” His Oration shows no interest in incarnation theology, a d octrine named only once in a p erfunctory roster of Christian beliefs. Christ is mentioned only twice, as the agent of atonement and a keeper of secrets, but never the Man-­God. Least of all was Pico’s proj­ect the Faustian “mastery of nature and power over the world” that Papini glorified. Showing how to exit the world, the Oration preaches an ascetic regimen that annihilates the self in God, the very obliteration of concrete humanity from which the Re­nais­sance rescued medieval Christians—­according to Papini’s pamphlet, which says not a word about Kabbalah.72 For Papini’s journal, in 1943, Garin reviewed Studia Humanitatis, papers from the first meeting of an Institute in Berlin founded by Ernesto Grassi, an impresario who kept Italian Fascism, on the cultural side, up-­to-­date with the Nazis during the war. Closing his review, Garin summed up Papini’s contribution to Re­nais­sance studies: “If we turn to the Re­nais­sance ­today, moved by an essential concern and not by learned curiosity—as Giovanni Papini has forcefully emphasized—we can only send our heartiest best wishes to an institution [Grassi’s] that aims, as ours in Florence [Papini’s] has already done, to recover guidance that might save ­those sacred values of man, the magnum miraculum, in the hour of the Italian spirit’s story when [in the Re­nais­sance] it shone most brightly.” Courting Papini by alluding to Pico’s speech, Garin flattered an intellectual who had no patience with scholarship—as Garin signaled by apologizing to him for his own “learned curiosity” about Pico as “boring and unbearably pedantic.”73 Nonetheless, once Papini took charge of his new Center in 1937, institutional realities gave Garin another power­ful patron—­second only to Gentile—­until the end of the Fascist regime. Papini’s first assignment for the young man was to review Kristeller’s Supplement to Ficino’s published writings, and ­there ­were more jobs to come. He and Garin corresponded

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about articles and book reviews, proofs, and off prints—­the everyday back-­ and-­forth. They also traded gossip, flattery, and f­ avors, including committee assignments and ideas for conferences and publishing proj­ects, all in the usual course of academic business. Some products of this commerce ­were ephemeral, like Garin’s anthology of Quattrocento philosophy in 1942: this book flew Papini’s new banner as the head of an Institute, a few months ­a fter his Center had been upgraded. Other results of collaboration w ­ ere lasting, like Garin’s edition of Pico’s works—­still without the Disputations, however, ­because it was “too big, undefined in many parts and of small interest.” The editor also planned “to exclude the Conclusions and Apology”—­where Kabbalah is abundant—­“­either ­because of the structure or b ­ ecause the sources of inspiration ­were contingent.” The Oration—­contingent enough for the prince to leave it unpublished—­was a dif­fer­ent story: “perhaps the most impor­tant and finest work of Re­nais­sance philosophy, and a real manifesto for an era.”74 One proj­ect from his time with Papini was still a hot button for Garin in 1949, when more than a de ­cade of extraordinary productivity had prepared him to compete for a professorial appointment. A new item in his file was Der italienische Humanismus from 1947. Writing in En­glish for an American journal, a reviewer (an Italian visiting at Duke) compared the 1947 book with a 1941 volume published by Garin “­under the auspices of a Fascist institution.” The organ­ization was Milan’s Institute for Studies of International Politics (ISPI)—­still active ­today with a reformed mission—­ and the editor of its series was Gioacchino Volpe, a Fascist academic whose Italy on the Way was enormously popu­lar: he convinced many Italians that Fascism was indeed their way forward. Garin’s 1941 book, linked by the reviewer with Fascism, was ἀ e Italian Re­nais­sance, another anthology of texts. Replying to his critic’s “venomous insinuations,” the author countered that not every­thing about ISPI was Fascist. But the review also spotted shifts in Garin’s views on the Re­nais­ sance. In the 1941 anthology, the glory of that era was republican politics inspired by the pagan classics. “But in a ­later article, published this time ­under the pious auspices of the neo-­Catholic Giovanni Papini, Dr. Garin made the discovery that the Re­nais­sance was essentially Christian.” This ­later piece was the first version of Garin’s fluctuating assessment of Gentile, originally published in the summer of 1944, soon ­after the phi­los­o­ pher was killed. “Now,” the reviewer continued—­referring to the new book



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on Italian humanism—­“Dr. Garin finds that humanism . . . ​is interested in ‘civil life.’ ”75 ­After twenty years of horror, many Italians changed their minds about basic issues: other­wise, Italy might have stayed Fascist. Like o ­ thers and with good reason, Garin tested his po­liti­cal options ­after the war. Some found him not just adaptable, however, but also expedient in be­hav­ior and evasive about motives. “He picks and chooses,” wrote one critic, “jumping from Fascism to the sacristy”—­Papini’s sacristy, a hot­house of religiosity. This is one finding of a recent inquest by Luciano Mecacci, retired from a chair of psy­chol­ogy in Florence. He describes Papini as a “champion of ultra-­traditionalist Catholicism” and puts him at the center of Garin’s universe during the war years.76 A dif­fer­ent view of the Garin / Papini partnership by an expert—­ Simonetta Bassi—­treats the ju­nior partner as sincerely religious, and Mecacci agrees that Garin did not cook his piety up to please Papini. As early as 1931, while speaking in a convent, Garin told the nuns that “life takes on the value of a ­great mission only through a higher ideality,” pointing to Gentile’s idealism as his inspiration. Bassi also finds ideas and turns of phrase from Papini throughout Garin’s writings, and she concludes that they ­were helpful to him: when Gentile’s picture of the Re­nais­sance looked too secular, for instance, Papini’s example helped sanctify it as a blend of “Christian experience with mature worldly reflection, creating a vision of the Kingdom of Man as a c onquest, a c reation pro­cessing through the Spirit’s pro­cess.” In 1941 Garin echoed Papini’s language when he summed up the spirit of the Re­nais­sance as rhapsodized by the director in his inaugural lecture at the Center: “neither titanism, nor rugged combat but a dream of ­human peace, a discordant concord of creative minds, a regnum ­ hole.”77 hominis where the shared good is greater than the w Since sharing is good, titanism—­whatever it is—­must be bad. Even worse was the risible theory of history embellished with this term by Papini. Garin’s response to the “vibrant pages” of this “new conception of the Re­nais­sance” makes difficult reading ­today. In the end, his relationship with Papini was bad f or both of them: the se­nior partner’s anarchic instincts and cheap piety disgraced their association—if only for a f ew years. In 1948 Papini wrote Garin to complain about a conference in Paris where the protégé had talked in the patron’s style about Pico’s “Christian spirit.” But Papini had not been invited. “What’s this about,” he asked. No answer from Garin appears in their published correspondence.78

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In 1953 and the year following, the two exchanged letters on another proj­ect: ­these last substantive messages w ­ ere not about the Re­nais­sance, however. Two years ­later, Papini died, and times had changed for Garin. Nearing the top of his game, he was not just the author of his book on Pico, he was also an authority on humanism and was making his mark as a public intellectual. ­After another few years, when his peers gathered to plan cele­brations in Mirandola for the 500th anniversary of the prince’s birth, who but Garin could they pick to give the keynote address? When he spoke about “Interpretations of Pico’s Thought,” his apprenticeship with Papini was a fading memory. He gave his talk on September 15, 1963, almost four months a­ fter Giuseppe Toff anin led a very dif­fer­ent commemoration in the same place. He was then an established eminence in his seventies, but a younger Toff anin had competed with Garin for Papini’s patronage when the Institute was only a C enter. In a few pages about Pico in his multivolume History of Humanism, first published in 1933, he described the prince as a “ deviation” from righ­teous Catholic umanesimo: Toff anin’s hatred of laicismo (secularism) must have appealed to Papini. “No statement by a h umanist compromised orthodoxy,” he insisted, except for “monstrosities” foisted on Pico by Ficino—­Kabbalah especially. “With Jews then nearing the borders of humanism,” according to Toff anin, “Pico paid a price in many tears.” Thirty years ­after his History appeared, Toff anin presided over papers read in Mirandola about Pico and biblical exegesis, Christology, the Lord’s prayer, Savonarola, scholasticism, and theology—­among other topics. Basing his own remarks on an antithesis between the wisdom (sapienza) of the Church ­Fathers and the secular knowledge (scienza) of pagan sages, he concluded that “no interpretation of Pico is acceptable if its direction is ­either pagan and individualist, taking Burckhardt’s view, or immanentist or rationalist, following idealist norms.” Fabio Pignagnoli, who spoke about Christology in the e­ arlier conference, produced this summary of Toff anin’s speech for an unfriendly review of the l­ater meeting. Calling Pico an “authentically Christian thinker” and citing his profession of Catholic orthodoxy in the Apology, Pignagnoli still wondered “how to reconcile a p ious philosophy of Christ with Kabbalah.” He found no good answer in the proceedings of e­ ither meeting. Garin, a careful scholar and well acquainted with “idealist norms,” told his audience in Mirandola how hard it was to keep any interpretation of Pico coherent. Active for only ten years or so, the impulsive prince had



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planned more than he achieved: many t­ hings caught his interest, but none was a “single nodal point.” Attempts to unify his short and fragmented ­career produced “bias and distortions”—­like the “alleged supremacy” of Kabbalah. Kabbalah was secondary and merely instrumental, according to Garin, compared to “the Hermetic texts, the Neoplatonic writings or the works of pseudo-­Dionysius.” One unity stood out, however: the Oration, Conclusions, and Apology ­were parts of a ­whole. From the style and content of the other two works—­which he had declined to edit—­Garin concluded that the Oration, even if it was a “piece of cleverness,” was purposeful and more than a “ rhetorical exercise.” Pico or­ga­nized this “hymn to man” around two substantive themes congruent with the other two texts: “the dignity of man and doctrinal concord.” ­These findings—­prudently expressed, without ideological passion—­ were not the grandiose “proclamation of the demolished rights of man” that Papini had fathered on Pico. Garin’s steadier sense of history, focused by philosophical intelligence, won him the confidence of experts in Italy and around the world. Eventually, in 1978, he became director of the institute founded before the war as Papini’s cathedral. With Garin in charge, however, the institute’s mission was secular scholarship. Yet during the same phase of his c­ areer, Garin also promoted a new philosophy—­ existentialism—­that was also an ideology. Perhaps its popu­lar appeal helped Italians forget the irrationalism and actualism that few could tolerate ­after the war.79

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Pico Existentialist or Actualist? Thinking presupposes only itself; it is self-­sufficiency, self-­positing, self-­creation, autoctisis. —­g a r i n

1. ​Gentile Dead or Alive? Before World War I, when his partnership with Giovanni Gentile was still thriving, Benedetto Croce produced a masterpiece of polemical metaphysics: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Hegel’s Philosophy? This de­mo­li­ tion of Hegel’s dialectic strained Croce’s alliance with Gentile, but the two kept working together ­until ­after the ­Great War. ­Later, near the end of a greater war, Garin faced a question like the one that Croce had asked, transposed to Gentile’s actualism. B ­ ecause Gentile was a con­spic­u­ous Fascist, Garin’s answer had to look beyond the phi­los­o­pher’s philosophy to his politics. His war­time letters to Gentile came from an ­eager client whose patience with his patron fi­nally wore thin. Starting in 1940, Garin wrote regularly to update Gentile about a proj­ ect of importance to both of them: a h istory of Italian philosophy to be published by Vallardi that Gentile had long neglected—­more on this book ­later. Knowing that a p roduct had been promised before he was born, Garin stuff ed his letters to Gentile with the usual obsequious formalities, ­until his tone changed abruptly in the spring of 1944—­when Allied bombing of Florence began. In a curt message he asked Gentile to consider him “released from a c ommitment which, as far as I’m concerned, they”—­ meaning Vallardi—­“ have already treated as void or actually non­ex­is­tent.” Garin wrote the letter in Florence on April 10. On April 15, Gentile was shot dead near a villa outside the city.1 128



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Garin was scheduled to speak on April 17 about Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, who was revered by Roman Catholics as an episcopal reformer and a saint of the Catholic Reformation. As a villain of the Counter-­Reformation, however, he was despised by Protestants for burning their ancestors. Garin’s talk about San Carlo was to be part of a series arranged by Gentile for Mussolini’s supporters in Florence. ­Because of Gentile’s funeral, the event had to be rescheduled for April 19, and nothing of Garin’s speech survives. A Florentine newspaper portrayed him as “bound by filial friendship” to the deceased and as eulogizing his “high moral stature,” hoping that Gentile’s example would move Italians to “save what is left of our poor fatherland, our dignity as ­humans.”2 When Gentile was killed, his im­mense presence vanished with him, giving Garin space to declare his in­de­pen­dence. He spoke up about his patron twice in the years following his death, first in 1944, in the summer ­after the assassination, and again in 1947. The ­later, longer, and more careful statement revises the e­ arlier one and claims more distance from Gentile—­though without more clarity. The first—­a eulogy published in Papini’s journal and alluding to his cult of the F ­ ather—­finds Gentile “incontestably right” in his historicism, insofar as it was optimistic. The second—in Gentile’s Giornale Critico, ­under new management—­concludes only that the phi­los­o­pher “must be reckoned with,” ­after several pages of ­doing just that. But cautious disclaimers of Gentile’s views on the Re­nais­ sance could not dissolve Garin’s public ties to him: t­ here was too much history between them.3 ­Later, twenty years a­ fter the assassination, Garin himself was a public figure with his own past to contend with. At that time, in the early 1960s, a journalist looking through older rec­ords asked why—as Fascism was collapsing—­anyone would have given “talks on Counter-­Reformation saints to help an outcast of the regime move closer to Catholicism.” Garin’s years with the ultra-­Catholic Papini made him a target for critics of Gentile. But o ­ thers defended his “anti-­Fascist faith,” while all over postwar Eu­rope charges of collaboration clashed with tales of re­sis­tance. In this contentious climate, when Garin’s critics agreed to a truce, they noted how hard it had been for him “to shift from past positions to current ones.” A ­ fter another twenty years passed, another combatant from the 1960s recalled that the Fascist takeover of Italy was not an invasion by aliens, that the Party “maintained close and continuous relations with the intelligent­sia. . . . ​ What was called ‘honest dissimulation’ . . . ​became a frequent practice. . . . ​

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And Garin saw only the end of all security, the anguish characteristic of their time, in intellectuals . . . ​who ­were Fascist in politics.” 4 Garin’s card number in the Florence Fascio of the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) was 604918, dated January 5, 1931. As of that year, all teachers had to swear loyalty to the regime; without a Party card, he could not compete for a job. In his own words: “If you disagreed, you could go to jail or e­ lse leave Italy.” L ­ ater, a­ fter the war, he felt himself living in the “worst of Italy’s saddest centuries” ­because Fascism had ruined his country: that was in September 1945. Gentile had been dead less than two years, however, and Garin’s Borromeo talk had been a Gentile production. One critic questioned the timing of Garin’s turn away from the Party, which was, “if not ­after the fact, then certainly on the eve of Fascism’s final demise.”5 ­Because of Gentile’s stature in the PNF, Italians felt his po­liti­cal presence even ­after his power had declined: other­wise, why assassinate him? Garin’s connections with him—as ­others saw them—­were hard to separate from links with the Party. During the war he looked up to Gentile, cultivating a relationship that went back to 1931. Gentile was not his teacher, however. Garin was twenty when he won his laurea in 1929—­working with Ludovico Limentani in Florence—­and only twenty-­five in 1934 when he finished (but did not yet publish) the Pico book. Before then he studied the British Enlightenment ­until he read works by an expert in that field—­Ernst Cassirer—­that drew him to an ­earlier era, the Re­nais­sance. From the generations before Garin’s, a leading Italian authority on this period was Gentile, whose command of patronage attracted new talent. Nonetheless, like other young intellectuals, Garin published in outlets unfriendly to Gentile. (Limentani, his teacher, was no fan of the ­great man: he was a Jew who took risks in public as the regime grew more intolerant.) But Garin also wrote for journals allied with or run by Gentile—­including the Giornale Critico, and by Gentile’s invitation. Garin’s “complicated” (his own word) relationship with Gentile was of the client / patron type. He was in touch indirectly with Gentile by 1931, he published in his journal in 1932, wrote to him in 1936, and met with him in 1937. ­After a ­later meeting in 1939, Gentile introduced him to Sansoni, an impor­tant Florentine publisher. But the crucial connection was made in 1940 through Vallardi, a more impor­tant Milanese ­house. Gentile had contracted in 1901 to produce a study of Italian philosophy for Vallardi’s multivolume History of Genres of Italian Lit­er­a­ture. Work ­stopped in 1915, partway through the war. The proj­ect revived only in 1940 with a proposal



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from Gentile to Garin—­which he accepted—to take on its second half. He was to begin ­after Florentine Neoplatonism, where Gentile promised to finish by 1942. Gentile never delivered, and a­ fter the assassination Vallardi turned the ­whole t­ hing over to Garin, whose typescript was ready in 1947. Einaudi acquired the book l­ater, and the result was Garin’s Storia della filosofia italiana in 1966, accompanied in that year by a continuation of the Cronache di filosofia italiana, whose first installment had come out in 1955. The Chronicles in the 1966 Laterza edition confirmed Garin’s mastery of con­temporary Italian thought, framed by the Einaudi History’s ­grand narrative of Italian philosophy, starting with Boethius and continuing through Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci. Both ­these monumental works are distinctly Garin’s: alterations in the 1966 History distance it from the 1947 version in order to secularize it—by eliminating a link between Pico and Bonaventura’s Christian mysticism, for example, while nonetheless claiming that the book “was left as it came out in 1947 . . . ​without substantial changes.” When the History of Italian Philosophy was still Vallardi’s property, however, its aura was Gentile’s dominance of the historiography of Italian philosophy. The ­grand narrative was originally Gentile’s, and Garin was Gentile’s heir.6 More than three de­cades before the magisterial History and Chronicles of the mid-1960s, the young author of the Pico book was in a weaker position. His resources of mind w ­ ere remarkable, but how much m ­ ental energy could a new liceo teacher muster in faraway Palermo, learning about Pico and the Re­nais­sance as a mi­grant from the British Enlightenment? How much of Garin could have been left for the con­temporary Italian thought that he eventually mastered? If the question w ­ ere just about Gentile’s system—by itself a very tough nut—­the likely answer is that not enough was left. ­After all, to understand Gentile’s idealism, one would also need to deal with its rivals: not just Croce, but also Husserl, Heidegger, and other contenders named by Garin in 1945. Genius and youthful energy are finite—as shown by Giovanni Pico’s experience, for example. How much understanding could Garin, while writing his book about Pico, have spared for the rest of philosophy in his mid-­twenties?7 The question cuts deep b ­ ecause Italian readers could be expected to treat Garin’s Pico book not just as a work of scholarship but also as a profession of ideology. By i ncluding chapters on the knowledge of God, the philosophy of love, the world of the Spirit, and the Kingdom of Man, Garin

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invited such readings. What would be made of this summary passage from the first page of his conclusion, for example? Although Pico’s thought is fragmentary and incomplete, one cannot miss its deep animating motive: asserting the infinite value of the ­human Spirit, divine in its intelligence, a u nity across its many frail accomplishments (attuazioni), rooted in God, f­ ree of ­every natu­ral and artificial bond. . . . ​The concord of phi­los­o­phers, which was the historical point of departure and goal of his thinking, involves the conception of the essential unity of thought thinking (pensiero pensante) for which individuals (singoli) are only vehicles carry­i ng it—­ those transient individuations whose frailty does no damage to the eternity of that thinking.8

In fact, as Garin wrote, philosophical concord was promoted by Pico in the Quattrocento. Nothing ­else in the passage, however, is distinctive of Re­nais­sance philosophy. “Transient individuations” is technical philosophy talk and could have been said by any thinker a­ fter the eleventh c­ entury. And attuazioni is an ordinary Italian word, which outside this passage might bear ­little weight—­except that the heart of Gentile’s system is “the act (atto) that is always act, pure act.” Pensiero and pensante are also ordinary Italian words, and yet paired, as ‘thought thinking,’ they make a term of art—­and a signal—­tied to Gentile’s actualism just as Dasein is tied to Heidegger’s phenomenology: in 1945 Garin himself used “atto pensante” in just this way to endorse actualism for its “passionate exaltation of the concreteness of the act (atto) of the Spirit.”9 Alerted by ­these words to the presence of Gentile’s ideas, we are told that ­human persons—­singoli—­are contingent transport for thought thinking eternally, mules for the Spirit to ­ride on. And in the demesne of the Spirit as Pure Act (Atto)—­the Act theorized by Gentile’s General ἀ eory—­ what can our feeble attuazioni do, since they are never active enough? The moral cost of this abstruse metaphysics is easier to estimate than to pay. Garin was closer than any of us, of course, to the atrocities of Fascism, from which he suff ered through his ­whole adult life. On a r eading that must be respected, a message of his Pico book was moral witness against ­those brutalities. Summing up his analy­sis of the ­whole work, Cesare Vasoli explained that he had “dwelled long on this book not only ­because it reveals the deepest certainties and existential values of the young Garin but also ­because—in the year 1937, on the eve of the racial laws and ­under



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threat from the most terrible and brutal catastrophe of the last c­ entury—­his insistent appeal for peace and for the freedom and dignity of man also took on an explicit po­liti­cal meaning.” Vasoli was a student and colleague of Garin who knew him through most of their lives: like Garin, he was also a master of Re­nais­sance thought. He spoke on this issue with authority, claiming that central themes of the Pico book—­peace, freedom, and ­human dignity—­were in themselves challenges to Fascism.10 Perhaps so. But in what sense could Garin’s “values” have been “existential” in 1937? Garin himself dated his first awareness of existentialism to 1942. And w ­ ouldn’t any plea for peace, freedom, and dignity have had some sort of po­liti­cal valence? Notions so large, inevitably, are also so pliable that they can be turned to many uses, as in Orwell’s nightmare of 1984. In his Fascist Manifesto, for example, Gentile claimed that “the individual might find his life’s purpose, his liberty and his e­ very right” in a tyrannical ideology. Such g­ rand words have no “explicit po­liti­cal meaning” that can be pinned down. And it is not credible that the “values” expressed by them could have been existentialist—if that is what Vasoli meant by “existential”—in the Italy of 1937.11 Other­wise, Garin may have intended the large contours of his book to send the message that Vasoli saw t­ here. But that is hard to say. What about the finer grain of Garin’s language, as in his evocation of pensiero pensante? Claudio Cesa, another acute reader of Garin—­and a colleague of his in Florence and Pisa—­saw such terms as cases of “abbreviation,” not pledges to any school. Abbreviations of what? Cesa thought that all of Eu­ro­pean idealism between the wars was being coded. And yet Garin himself identified exactly ­these words as Gentile’s. The likelihood is this: the brilliant young Garin, an aspiring phi­los­o­pher in an unstable culture, knew enough about Gentile’s actualism to signal vague affinity with it at a time when Gentile could be a power­ful patron—as he came to be for Garin. ­There was prob­ably not much e­ lse to it in 1934 or 1937, while the Pico book was on the way.12 A dif­fer­ent prob­lem is less po­liti­cal or philosophical than historical: its locus is the recent past of philosophy and ideology, where Garin helped give the ‘dignity of man’ its modern form. When he published his breakthrough book in 1937, actualism was an accessible Italian philosophy that might suit this (purportedly) Re­nais­sance notion: conclusive evidence of Garin’s admiration for the author of actualism comes from himself, writing in 1945. His task then was a general History of Philosophy (with Vallecchi,

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not Vallardi) that identified “­today’s thinkers” (at the time) as existentialists, tacitly consigning Gentile to yesterday. While praising his patron’s passion, Garin was even more excited about existentialist novelties. Again, this was in 1945. And he called 1947—­a de­cade ­after the Pico book—­the year that ended his youth. In that framework, with both Pico and the Vallecchi History assigned to the past, could it have been existentialism and not actualism, or maybe existentialism and actualism, at which the young Garin had been gesturing long before—in 1937?13 Chronology rules out both options. Existentialism as Sartre defined it in 1945—­not Heidegger’s thought or Gabriel Marcel’s from the 1920s and 1930s—­was what Garin eventually discovered in Pico and humanism, while distinguishing Heidegger’s “banalities” from what he admired in Sartre. “Obviously, at the end of 1945,” he recalled, “if I had read Heidegger and Sartre, I clearly could not have known what they had not yet written”—­ meaning the exchange that started late in 1945, ended in 1947 with Heidegger’s letter “On Humanism,” and created an occasion to publish Garin’s own book about Italian Humanismus si­mul­ta­neously in the same series. To show what his thinking could not have been before 1947, Garin excluded Sartre’s mature and well-­branded existentialism from his Humanismus and hence from his Pico book of ten years e­ arlier. Garin’s major statement about Pico—­never revised—­owed nothing to the type of existentialism that he came to connect with Pico.14

2. ​Actualism and Autoctisis According to Garin, the story of the ‘dignity of man’ started long before Pico, with the Church ­Fathers, whom Papini’s nonsense would have mystified. With his mind on the speech by Pico that we call On the Dignity of Man—­though its author did not call it that—­Garin was right to look back to the F ­ athers, whom Pico knew well. But he might also have looked forward to Friedrich Schiller—as a follower of Kant—­writing On Grace and Dignity, since the Pico known to us, and to Garin, is an artifact of post-­ Kantian idealism, mainly as Gentile presented it. An artifact from the same factory of lofty philosophizing and trivial sentiment was the ‘dignity of man’ that Jessica Mitford mocked, a p iece of catechetical furniture prized by Garin.15 What Kant and Schiller started still sparks debate about the dignity of man. In his l­ater years, however, Garin was too worn down to be excited



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even by this idea. But he reminisced about better times when he learned about Pico and a “ humanism that presented man as an act of existential ­free choice unconditioned by any ‘nature’ what­ever, as an existence that precedes and constitutes essence.” Criticizing Heidegger’s letter “On Humanism” and its criticism of Sartre, Garin defended the historic lecture that Sartre gave in 1945, Existentialism Is a Humanism, which endorses atheism—­“a handful of mud,” in Papini’s words. “If God does not exist,” Sartre explained, t­ here is at least one being for whom existence precedes essence, who exists before he can be defined by any concept. . . . ​Man first exists, encounters himself, looms up in the world and defines himself afterward. . . . ​If he is not definable, this is ­because he is nothing at first. He ­will be only l­ater, and he w ­ ill be what he makes himself. Hence ­there is no ­human nature. . . . ​Man is not only as he conceives himself but as he wants himself, . . . ​nothing ­else but what he makes himself. . . . ​This theory is the only one to give man a dignity, the only one that does not make an object out of him. . . . ​This is what we call ‘existentialist humanism.’

Existence precedes essence: Sartre’s terse maxim took the mea­sure of Western philosophy—­classical, scholastic, post-­Cartesian, and post-­ Kantian—­and became a catchphrase for his existentialist humanism. His plain words w ­ ere the spare language of authority. God is dead. No atonement is required. God’s death, however unsettling, is a victory, burying the old dogmas of essence that have kept ­people from seeing that dignity comes only from what one makes of existing.16 1947, the year of Heidegger’s reply to Sartre, was also the year of Garin’s Italienische Humanismus, a defining work for him. But he thought of it as closing a part of his ­career, not opening a new one. Ten years had passed since the Pico book (never to be revised) was published. Humanismus, with part of a chapter about Pico, was the fifth volume in the “Writings” series of a collection, edited by Ernesto Grassi and Wilhelm Szilasi, called “Tradition and Mission.” Volume 5 of the “Prob­lems and Notes” series of the same collection, also published in 1947, included “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” by Heidegger, with his letter “On Humanism” appended. Szilasi, a Hungarian Jew, was close to Heidegger in the 1920s, when Grassi—an Italian—­was Heidegger’s student.17 The Heidegger who replied to Sartre had been a celebrity—­and then a notoriety—­for twenty years. His Being and Time (1927) had long been

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famous—­however ­little it was understood. In Italy Gentile’s actualism was older and even better established, announced before World War I and fully stated by 1923. But existentialism was a newcomer. Before Sartre described it so crisply in 1945, even Sartre was not sure that Sartre was an existentialist. And in Italy before World War II, existentialism was less a philosophy than an “attitude”—to use a distinction made by Gramsci. Even in 1945, while conveying the interest caused by the new movement, Garin called it a “tendency” rather than a theory.18 The book that rec­ords Garin’s remark is a survey of Western philosophy, a two-­volume history published by Vallecchi, a successful ­house and a base for the ­l ittle magazines (Leonardo, La Voce, Lacerba) where Papini and ­others had fought about culture and politics before 1918. ­A fter Laterza dropped Gentile in 1920, Vallecchi brought out many of his books, and he joined the publisher’s board in 1927. By 1945 Gentile was gone, however, and Garin was finishing his History of Philosophy as a “profession of anti-­Fascist faith . . . ​w ritten during the Nazi occupation.” Although this History sold out two printings, its author resisted plans for a new edition on the reasonable grounds that it was a “popu­ lar” work, not just outdated but based on shaky research ­u nder war­t ime conditions. Just ­because it was popu­lar, however, Garin’s History had (at least) the virtues of its defects: addressed to educated Italians, not just a few professors, it was his coming-­out as a public voice of philosophy and its history.19 Although Gentile was dead in 1945, Croce was still alive and active: both names would come up in the History that Garin published in that year, forced to compare the two old partners and adversaries—­a contest that Croce lost, in Garin’s judgment. Croce had found Hegel’s system wrong at its core—­the dialectic of being, not-­being, and becoming—­which he attacked as a metaphysical straightjacket. “Hegelian dialectic has been caricatured many times,” he wrote, “but no caricature could equal what the author himself accomplished unconsciously when he tried to think of Africa, Asia and Eu­rope, or the hand, nose and ear, or f­ amily patrimony, paternal power and testament in the same rhythm of thought that he used for being, nothing and becoming.” To save Hegel from this silliness, Croce divided his idealism into two parts, salvaging dialectical oppositions among being, not-­being, and becoming where they correctly apply, but substituting nondialectical notions of distinction and degree elsewhere, when triadic oppositions cannot work.20



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According to Garin, however, Croce’s reform of Hegelian idealism failed the test of concreteness—­concretezza—­a criterion without peer in Garin’s reckoning and Gentile’s. To be concrete was to be true, good, and beautiful, whereas it was false, bad, and ugly to be abstract. Abstraction was the flaw—­ Garin claimed—in Croce’s pre­sen­ta­tion of the dialectical pulse of the Spirit that drives it to “circulate in vari­ous forms as it unwinds in a developmental rhythm (history) through a pro­cess of endless liberation, from clarity to clarity.” Since this “history is the history of liberty,” the news would seem to be good. But the news was too good b ­ ecause Croce “tends to flatten out the pro­gress of the Spirit in a f ated sequence of before and ­after.” What­ever comes next turns out to be both inevitable and right, and history “gets identified with the course of events in a fatalist optimism.”21 When Garin let this judgment be printed in 1945, his Italian readers had long accepted a na rrative of philosophy culminating in the idealisms of Croce and Gentile. But in Garin’s view—at the age of thirty-­six, without secure professorial employment, admonishing Italy’s saint of liberalism with the ashes of Fascism still warm—­Croce’s idealism got it wrong on the basics. What about Gentile’s? In Garin’s words, Gentile’s thinking was the “passionate exaltation of the concreteness (concretezza) of the act of the Spirit, and in this melting-­down of the solid structures of abstraction in the living crucible of concrete thought thinking (concreto pensiero pensante), in this, in his deep consciousness of the life of the Spirit, lies the very g­ reat value and deep eff ectiveness of Gentile’s theorizing.” The system that earned such applause overcame another system—­ Croce’s: “Gentile accused Croce of having put the Spirit, which is concrete activity, into abstract pigeonholes.” Croce’s scheme of distinctions and degrees replacing dialectical oppositions killed the life of the Spirit by “deadening it from outside” and trying to divide where no division was pos­si­ble. Unlike Croce, Gentile was a Hegelian of the strict observance who insisted on “the truth of Hegel’s system” as “the finest achievement of modern philosophy, . . . ​t he affirmation of the concrete activity of thinking, of the Spirit as pure act. . . . ​Real­ity for Gentile ­really lies . . . ​in the activity of thinking as a pro­cess of self-­formation, of self-­creation. Thinking presupposes only itself; it is self-­sufficiency, self-­positing, self-­creation, autoctisis.” Although Garin acknowledged Croce’s mastery of the historian’s empirical craft, and thus his “interest in the concrete that characterized

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positivism,” it was Gentile who got the top prize for concretezza, even though the act that he put at the heart of real­ity was thinking. How this might be so, how pure thinking can be supremely concrete, is a long story: suffice it to say that Gentile was a p hi­los­o­pher of enormous talent who made a compelling case for his idealism—so persuasive that in a textbook Garin found it natu­ral to leave Gentile’s obscure Grecism (autoctisi in Italian) unexplained, as if nonacademic readers would recognize it.22 ­Because autoctisis is only a pa rt of Gentile’s system, its story can be short—­a lso worth telling, for what it shows about Gentile, Garin, actualism, and existentialism.23 The story starts with Vincenzo Gioberti, who co-­starred in Gentile’s thesis at the Scuola Normale on Rosmini and Gioberti, the two patriot-­ philosophers who led the strug­gle against French empiricism—or ‘sensism’—­when it dominated Italian philosophy ­after the French Revolution. Gioberti distrusted Antonio Rosmini’s ‘psychologism,’ seeing it as useless against sensism and a surrender to skepticism. Gioberti’s key princi­ple was that ­human judgment has an object given to it—or revealed to it—by real Being, which is divine. A primitive judgment of a d ivinely presented object is foundational and therefore reliable, whereas treating all judgment as derived invites skepticism. Even worse: by relying on reflection—­subjective and intra-­human—to discover this objective, extra-­mental real­ity, psychologism reverses the order of creation, which proceeds from divine Being to worldly existence. Being, creation, and existence are primitive facts that we encounter passively, according to Gioberti. They are revealed in intuition—­immediately, directly, and in their natu­ral order—­not inferred by reflection. Intuition simply witnesses creation as a fact, as it actually happens. The mind, wrote Gioberti, is the “direct and immediate spectator of creation.”24 The mind that witnesses creation, according to Gioberti, was an agent of creation for Spaventa, who introduced Hegel to Italians in the generation ­after Gioberti and Rosmini. Gentile wrote what is still the best book on Spaventa and edited his works. ­There Spaventa meditated on Aristotle’s remarks about early philosophy: “Man is not born thinking, much less ­doing philosophy”; philosophy had to be in­ven­ted. An active capability for discovery and development, “setting a new world on top of the one that already exists,” distinguishes the h ­ uman animal from the nonhuman, “which always remains what it was at the beginning.” Only the ­human animal



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forms himself, his own existence and his own world, . . . ​so that the author and the work are one and the same. . . . ​This self-­creation . . . ​is the real worth and the real dignity (dignità) of man, his divine nature, and the absolutely faithful image of God on earth that it produces. I scarcely need to say that this autoctisis is h ­ uman freedom itself in its plain meaning, and that the untiring instrument of this freedom—­ liberty itself, in fact—is thinking, man’s freely reflecting on himself. Whoever does not think is not ­f ree, and without freedom ­t here is no  thinking. Now in fact the crown of ­free reflection is philosophical thinking.

­ uman agency can create and ­free itself in thought ­because ­humans are H created in the Creator’s image and likeness, where thinking—­ultimately, philosophical thinking—is freedom’s best instrument.25 This secular sermon for Catholic intellectuals takes its text not from Pico’s Oration but from the Metaphysics of Aristotle, a pagan for whom an eternal universe precluded creation. Just as unclassical as the doctrine of creation was the term that Spaventa used—­autoctisis, a noun coined (perhaps by himself) from autoktitos, an adjective used by Aeschylus to mean ‘self-­produced.’ Gentile, Spaventa’s editor and interpreter, had obviously thought about this passage on autoctisis: commenting on Vico in 1907, he wrote that “the Spirit, as Spaventa used to say, is autoctisis.” Nine years ­later he gave a ­whole chapter to autoctisis in his General ἀ eory of the Spirit as Pure Act, a full pre­sen­ta­tion of actualism. Only a longer account of this book could do it justice, but a ­little injustice may help.26 The disease to be cured by autoctisis was an antinomy diagnosed by Kant but never cured, the hopeless choice “between an empty concept and a blind intuition.” Still groping in the dark, post-­Kantian phi­los­o­phers had seen the individual and the universal as abstractions locked in antagonism: “Think the individual, and you universalize it; think the universal, and you individualize it. . . . ​This inquiry, while dealing with the two extremes between which thinking moves, . . . ​has taken no account at all of the thinking itself in which the two extremes are immanent. From the universal that can be thought but does not think, and from the individual that can be intuited but does not intuit, we must turn to the concreteness (concretezza) of thinking in act, a unity of universal and par­tic­u­lar, of concept and intuition.” Not just any thinking would do. “The distinction between abstract thinking and concrete thinking is . . . ​the keystone.”

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Concrete thinking was essentially positive ­because it was the thinking that ­really existed. For Descartes, the cogito proved existence; for Gentile, the cogito was existence. “If I am not thinking,” he explained, “I am not. I am in that I am thinking. And so I am only in that I am thinking. . . . ​­Here we have the real positivity.” This real positivity mocked the empiricist positivism that Gentile despised. His contorted language rewards study b ­ ecause it helped create Pico’s modern persona.27 Like Descartes, Gentile meditated on dreaming, challenging a common view that when we wake from dreaming, the world drags us back from fantasy to real­ity. He objects that it is we who make the world real again. Real­ ity comes only from our own agency. Th ­ ere would be no real­ity at all to recover “if we w ­ ere cut off from the I. . . . ​The true and only positive is the act of the subject that posits itself as such, and, by positing itself, posits . . . ​ all the real­ity that is positive.” Phi­los­o­phers, stymied by universals and individuals, lose track of “the subject, the I that thinks and, by thinking, universalizes itself by being individuated and individuates itself by being universalized.” No one would deny philosophical pilgrims their grail of a positive real­ity. But “the positive is posited not as the result of a pro­cess already finished and done, . . . ​[only] in that it posits itself actually by getting back into the being that is, in that it thinks itself.” In contrast to pensiero pensato, dead thought that has already happened, the thinking that still thinks itself—­pensiero pensante—is self-­creating: it is autoctisis.28 With complete conviction and a­ fter much argument, Gentile claimed that such thinking was the only ground of concreteness—­the criterion by which he, and Garin a­ fter him, evaluated every­thing ­else. Yet what could be less concrete than ­these frothy sentences about autoctisis that Gentile produced in 1916—­when Garin was seven years old—­for his General ἀ eory of actualism? By the early 1950s, when Garin’s Pico book was in all the libraries and his Chronicles of modern Italian thought ­were on the way, he was ready to cut ties with his old patron, fi­nally deploring actualism as an “abstract spiritualist metaphysics” full of “theologizing evasions” that licensed Fascist orators to “overcome prob­lems with words.” He located Gentile’s original sin—­spotted by his critics from early on—at the heart of the General ἀ eory, which allowed “the Act . . . ​to be emptied of concrete experience.” In the end, the “enchanted ­castle of idealism collapsed a­ fter imprisoning Italian phi­los­o­phers for de­cades and forcing them—­with no exceptions— to discuss shadows of ­things as imaginary prob­lems, often absurd, in a



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fictitious world.” Only a few years before, in Garin’s Vallechi History, Gentile had been a philosophical alchemist who “dissolved abstract rigidities in the living crucible of concrete thought thinking.” And now the ­great actualist was philosophy’s jailer.29

3. ​Existentialism and Modernism Before 1834, Coleridge wondered “­whether God was existentially as well as essentially intelligent”—­whether the Creator lets creatures know him only by a definition, theoretically, or also as an object of faith, practically. Such distinctions between essence and existence had been in play for centuries, applied to ­humans as well as their Maker. God, in his perfection, makes ­human creatures “­after our likeness,” exactly as he plans: they are copies of a model, tokens of a type, instances of an essence. Although God knows ­every essence eternally, the instances created by him exist only in time: in creatures all existence is temporal. In many ways, then, essence precedes existence, according to doctrines well known in Coleridge’s day.30 ‘Existentialism’ came ­later: in 1919 a G erman phi­los­o­pher used the word Existentialismus to label the view that logic depends on what exists; psychologists ­were using the En­glish term in the 1920s, phi­los­o­phers in the 1930s—to name an anti-­idealist German theology based on “a philosophy which makes being its starting point.” It took more than ten years for this theory to become a fad, news big enough for a headline in Life magazine: Existentialism: Amid Left-­Bank revels, postwar Paris enthrones a bleak philosophy of pessimism derived by a French atheist from a Danish mystic. Existentialism in late 1945 was the “disillusioned cry of decline and spiritual bankruptcy” in a liberated city ready to party. Life’s man in Paris lampooned the new movement as a cult tangled in “all-­but-­impenetrable dialectical jargon. . . . ​What existentialism means, few Frenchmen know.” On that score, Life’s reporter was right, and he could have said the same about Italians.31 Garin, in his longest autobiographical statement, placed his first encounter with esistenzialismo in talks with Ernesto Grassi about humanism that took place ­after 1942. Luigi Pareyson had described the new ideas for Gentile’s Giornale Critico in 1940, but in 1941 Norberto Bobbio still saw existentialism as just a “fashion.” He named its main voices in Italy as

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Pareyson and Nicola Abbagnano, whose Introduction to Existentialism appeared a year ­after Bobbio’s note. Abbagnano’s ­earlier work, ἀ e Structure of Existence, was in the line of Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Gabriel Marcel—­according to Bobbio, who was less enthusiastic about Marcel. Abbagnano wrote that the “first Italian contributions to existential analy­ sis” w ­ ere his own ­earlier book and Enzo Paci’s Princi­ples of a Philosophy of Being, both from 1939. Bobbio did not mention Cesare Luporini, whose ­Human Existence began to circulate in 1942. In the same year, Garin reviewed Luporini’s book, and he may already have met Abbagnano by 1938. A second edition of Luporini’s book still impressed him in 1945—­“at the start of a new liberty.”32 By the early 1940s esistenzialisti ­were being Italianized. In 1943 Abbagnano and Paci joined Armando Carlini and Ugo Spirito to open an exchange in Giuseppe Bottai’s journal, Primato. Bottai, one of the first Fascists, was militant and a promoter of the racial laws. His journal, while conceding “some visibility” to the new “turn in philosophy,” boasted that the Italian version was especially “constructive and positive.” Abbagnano and Paci took three pages to make this case, but Spirito needed only one page to undercut it: Spirito’s teacher, Gentile, had already attacked him in print for blurring the Party line. The debate in Primato continued for three months and attracted eight more contestants, including Luporini and Gentile—­both reluctantly. The arrival of existentialism, seen as a gain or a loss, was a minor advent in Italy for this small circle of specialists, nothing so g­ rand as Sartre’s Pa­ri­ sian rentrée of 1945. Sartre gave the lecture that made his name in the autumn of that year to a nearly hysterical crowd: not since Heidegger spoke at Davos in 1929 had Eu­ro­pean philosophy cheered its own pop star. Sartre’s talk was short and less polished than his literary work, but the rhe­toric was clearer and simpler. “Is existentialism a humanism?” Sartre said yes ­because “existence precedes essence.” What Life condemned as de­cadent pessimism, he presented as hopeful and activist—­mankind’s best chance within the limits of the “­human condition.”33 ­Because God was dead, ­there was no Creator to confer essences on creatures. (So much for Papini and the ­Father as Creator.) Lacking an essence or a nature or a self-­concept given a priori, ­humans can—­and must—­build their own foundations. Before facing choices required by self-­construction, man already exists, which is why h ­ uman existence precedes essence, both temporally and in a de eper metaphysical sense. “Man is nothing other



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than what he makes himself. That is the first princi­ple of existentialism. It is also what we call ‘subjectivity,’ . . . ​meaning only that man has a greater dignity than the stone or the t­ able. . . . ​Man is first of all a p roj­ect lived subjectively. . . . ​Prior to this proj­ect, nothing exists, . . . ​and ­after having made himself what he is, . . . ​man is responsible for what he is.” Riding ­these giddy cadences, Sartre warns that subjectivity is a constraint, not a license. The ­human subject is thrown into the world with other ­people who are also subjects: “Each of us chooses himself, but . . . ​in choosing himself, he chooses all h ­ umans. . . . ​Choosing . . . ​is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, for we can never choose evil. What we choose is always the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.” The other side of subjectivity—­despite the promise of “always”—is a burdensome freedom to choose: “Man is ­free, man is freedom” but man is also “condemned to be f­ ree.” When Garin considered t­ hese words late in life—­words he could have read only ­after the speech was published in February 1946—he had come to understand Sartre as “repeating almost to the letter (though obviously without knowing it) vari­ous celebrated statements by an Italian ‘humanist’ of the Quattrocento (a famous name, but ­little read), who was certainly no atheist, . . . ​Pico della Mirandola. . . . ​If we look deeply, Sartre’s atheism and Pico’s humanism (with its Hermetic-­Kabbalist background) ­were not far apart in substance, while the humanism that Heidegger discussed . . . ​ was an altogether dif­fer­ent ­matter.” At some point Garin had changed his mind about Sartre, though when is unclear. In 1946, before glossing ‘humanism’ with ‘existentialism’ in his own work, he had attacked the French thinker as arrogant, barbaric, and “strangely perverse.” In 1947 he described the “sense of dizziness and mystical yearning for self-­dissolution” in Sartre’s fiction as dehumanizing. The Vallardi History of the same year, while summarizing Pico’s views about mankind, said nothing about existence preceding essence. Garin was also ­silent about this core idea of Sartre’s in the Einaudi edition of 1966—in the same chapter, lightly rewritten, with an updated bibliography. It was much ­later, in 1998, that “Sartre’s atheism and Pico’s humanism” seemed “not far apart.” This assessment seems to have been settled by 1968, however: in that year, while discussing humanism, Garin endorsed Sartre’s maxim about existence and essence and echoed his phrases—­“ un choix: projet et non destin”—to describe Pico’s ideas while denouncing Heidegger for rejecting “the ­whole terminology of humanism. To him the vari­ous

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humanisms seemed condemned to die of asphyxia in the void of metaphysical subjectivism.”34 But Heidegger’s opposition to what Garin held dearest was not always so clear. Luporini, an existentialist whom Garin admired, had come to Being and Time from Gentile’s actualism, which Luporini praised for guiding him through that book’s thickets. He described his own ­Human Existence as “rising from the convergence of the three liveliest movements in con­temporary thought: Italian idealism, the philosophy of life and existential philosophy.” Garin, reviewing Luporini’s book in 1942, sensed an “imperative for liberation” in this “meditation on basic themes of actualist idealism and existentialism.” As Garin saw it, the ancestry of existentialism in Italy was both vitalist and actualist, coming from Henri Bergson and Gentile as well as Heidegger—­Luporini’s teacher in Freiburg in the early 1930s, when Heidegger delivered his Rektoratsrede as a member of the Nazi Party.35 In 1945, before Heidegger attacked the existentialism that Sartre called a humanism, Garin published the chapter that ends the Vallecchi History of Philosophy—­“­Today’s Thinkers: From Phenomenology to Existentialism.” The chapter says more about the latter than the former, more about German than French existentialism, and nothing at all about Sartre. The French are Marcel, René Le Senne, and Louis Lavelle—­not Sartre—­and they get only two paragraphs, ­after nine pages on the Germans: Karl Barth, Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Heidegger, and Jaspers, the last two being the “real, true German existentialists.” As a practical ­matter—­during the war, when the Vallecchi History was written—­German ideas w ­ ere more current in Italy than French ideas.36 Garin characterizes Heidegger’s questioning of esserci (Dasein), esistenza (Existenz), angoscia (Angst) and nulla (Nichts) as philosophy done in the first person. As a product of its day, when Being and Time was so ­little understood, his digest holds its own, though he mistook Heidegger’s provisional phenomenology of being for a settled morality of freedom that directs us to “affirm ourselves in our personal authenticity when we manfully accept our finitude. . . . ​Saying ‘yes’ to our death transforms the slavery of the banal fear of death into the ultimate affirmation of ourselves in our finitude, into liberty through death.” Anxiety, authenticity, finitude, nothingness: t­ hese are notes from Heidegger’s score that Sartre would ­later replay, but in a dif­fer­ent register—so dif­fer­ent that Heidegger repudiated his most successful follower in the dawn of his glory.37



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­Mistakes about Heidegger—­made by many, not just Sartre or Garin—­ outnumber insights. Even at its best, as in Being in Time, his writing is hard to read, as thorny as the thinking it expresses. The philosophy is difficult—­ many would say impossible, some would say worse: incoherent, evasive, fraudulent, and so on. And Heidegger’s thought wears the shame of his Nazi uniform. Still, in the end, he wrote his letter “On Humanism” to answer another famous statement about philosophy that called his own invention—­existentialism—­a ‘humanism.’ Sartre gave his talk in Paris on October 29, 1945, a day ­a fter Heidegger had written to say how impressed he was with Being and Nothingness. Heidegger wanted to meet, but personal prob­lems (a m ­ ental breakdown) and po­liti­cal trou­bles (investigation by the Allies) made a meeting impossible. Meanwhile, the Paris lecture was transforming Sartre into a global spokesman for what Being and Time had announced in 1927 to almost no one who understood it. Within a y ear of Sartre’s speech, Heidegger de­cided to respond by calling him a false prophet—­not of existentialism, certainly, since both of them disclaimed that label at vari­ous times, but of what Heidegger claimed his real work to be: getting at the truth of Being.38 The occasion for a statement came in November 1946, when Jean Beaufret, a French disciple, wrote to ask Heidegger what he thought of Sartre’s lecture. The letter “On Humanism” was his public reply in 1947. One task of the letter was to show Sartre where he had gone wrong about Being and Time, which had been in print for twenty years when the letter became public. Another job for this relatively short statement (66 pages) was to introduce a new phase of Heidegger’s thought. The update gave the weary no rest—­despite its brevity. Still, for the debate on humanism that started as the war ended, Heidegger’s letter and Sartre’s lecture w ­ ere gates that had to be unlocked, if not opened wide.39 The core of Being and Time is a question of ontology: What does ‘being’ mean when we talk about being as such, as apart from this being (a h ­ orse) or that being (a doorknob)? Heidegger’s approach is through the being intended when someone says ‘I am’ or ‘I exist.’ The phi­los­o­pher named this being Dasein, altering the valence of an ordinary German word, and he called his account of it ‘fundamental ontology.’ The method b ­ ehind the ontology was the phenomenology in­ven­ted by Husserl, Heidegger’s teacher. Phenomenology—­crudely described—­was less a theory or a doctrine than a procedure or experience. Husserl’s proj­ect was a p henomenology of

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consciousness; Heidegger’s was an exploratory phenomenology of being, starting with Dasein’s way of being, which was ‘existence.’ Existence sets Dasein apart from other beings: for Dasein, to exist is to understand being—­t he being of other beings as well as one’s own. The classes of Dasein’s being are ‘existentials,’ analogs of the ‘categories’ that other phi­los­o­phers had used to classify real­ity. ‘Being-­in-­t he-­world’ grounds all other existentials, indicating that Dasein is “always already ­t here”: in one sense, Dasein means ‘being-­t here.’ I am always already in a world that is not an object for me as a subject. On the contrary, my Dasein is ‘thrown’ into and ‘engaged’ in a world that it ‘shares,’ while always ‘projecting’ or getting ahead of itself and on to that world’s possibilities. As thrown, engaged, and projecting, Dasein has the being of ‘care’ or ‘concern.’ Deep down, care is living in time ruled by death—­the “Absolute Master,” in Hegel’s chilly phrase. B ­ ecause Dasein can deal well or badly with death, care can be ‘au­then­tic’ or ‘inauthentic.’ Au­then­tic care understands its being as being ‘­toward’ death in ‘ecstatic temporality,’ whose three ‘ecstases’ underlie care’s three components: Dasein as thrown, engaged, and projecting. Taken together, the three ecstases constitute the ecstatic temporality that gives meaning to Dasein’s being—­the being of care.40 So t­ hings stood in 1927 with Being and Time, which Heidegger never finished. L ­ ater works, including the 1947 letter, show where his masterpiece might have gone and how his thought eventually took several detours. At first, in Being and Time, to understand being is Dasein’s proj­ect, not an accomplishment: beyond Dasein’s eff ort to understand, t­ here is no being that actually is understood. In the l­ater works, however, Being constitutes Dasein, which no longer constitutes being by trying to understand it. To mark this turn, Heidegger altered his terminology: what had been Dasein’s Existenz became Ek-­sistenz, expressing how Dasein ‘stands out in’ the clearing (Lichtung) of Being, where both the illumination and its source transcend understanding yet guide Dasein ­toward the ‘truth of Being.’41 This truth can be had only as it relates—­constitutively—to Dasein’s essence, meaning that Dasein has an essence. This is a c laim that Heidegger made again and again in the 1947 letter, citing the crucial line from Being and Time: Das ‘Wesen’ des Daseins liegt im seiner Existenz; “Dasein’s ‘essence’ lies in its existence.” He then explained how accidents of publication had obscured his real point: that “ek-­sistence, thought of ecstatically, coincides with the customary existentia in neither form nor content.” Its



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content is “standing-­out into the truth of Being.” Sartre’s formulation, by contrast, was that existentia precedes essentia, accepting the usual metaphysics while flipping its polarity. “The reversal of a metaphysical proposition is still a metaphysical proposition,” Heidegger observed, adding that metaphysics always forgets the truth of Being.42 In Heidegger’s view, this forgetting might qualify as ‘existentialism,’ but it said nothing about Being and Time, where another sentence—­“the substance of man is existence”—­could also be misread. Misconstrued as metaphysics, the statement embeds Dasein in that obsolete science and its core term, ‘substance,’ thereby saddling Dasein with the ‘humanist’ definition of man, the ­human substance, as a ‘rational animal.’ The metaphysics lurking in this definition is man’s ontological structure: the genus ‘animal’ specified by the diff erence ‘rational’ defines mankind as the composite substance of m ­ atter and form, body and soul in the h ­ uman person. B ­ ecause “­these highest humanist specifications of man’s essence do not yet discover man’s real dignity, the thinking in Being and Time is to that extent against humanism.” 43 On behalf of ­human dignity, Heidegger opposed humanism. The rest of his letter explained why this stance is not illogical, irrational, immoral, and so on: “Thinking against ‘values’ does not claim that every­thing explained as ‘value,’ ‘culture,’ ‘art,’ ‘science,’ ‘­human dignity,’ ‘world’ and ‘God’ is valueless.” Rebutting such charges was also an aim of Sartre’s lecture, where Heidegger found the cure worse than the disease. Besides confusions about essence, existence, and subjectivity, he called out a number of other errors by Sartre, including the assumption that Heidegger was an atheist in the usual sense. As for opposing humanism, “to defend inhumanity and belittle the dignity of man” was not the point. Or so he said— in a polemic written a­ fter the Nazi defeat had threatened his living and his legacy.44 Perhaps Garin was right to call Heidegger’s few words on this topic—­ meaning ‘historical’ humanism—­banal. The German thinker saw humanitas in a classical antithesis of barbarism against the Roman version of the παιδεία that Greek philosophy had produced. The first ‘humanism’ so-­ called, however, was the Romanitas reborn in the Re­nais­sance to combat scholasticism as the latest barbarism. Goethe, Schiller, and Johann Winckelmann accepted this revival of ancient wisdom on behalf of Enlightened Eu­rope, but then Friedrich Hölderlin refused: his Romantic thoughts about man’s essence ­were too original, in Heidegger’s view, for a traditional

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humanism to grasp. When a new humanism broke with tradition in order to find dignity in freedom, what ‘freedom’ actually meant would decide not only what ‘humanism’ signified but also how to realize it.45 The task was compatible—­notionally—­with many versions of humanism: Marx’s, Sartre’s, and the Christian doctrines they tried to discredit. Each relied on a metaphysics. All such accounts of man’s essence already had their theories of being, without having questioned the truth of Being: all ­were metaphysical. All appeals to humanism are metaphysical, said Heidegger, and all metaphysics is humanist. In the deepest way, then, e­ very humanism is a ­mistake that does worse than just failing to ask about Being’s relation to man’s essence. All humanisms block and evade that fundamental question.46 Heidegger’s letter appeared with a reprint of his essay on “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” whose first version went back to 1931. ­These reflections on the Myth of the Cave already identified metaphysics with humanism, which always “encircles man with a smaller or larger metaphysical web.” The essay was published in the Yearbook for Intellectual Tradition, which was founded by Grassi in 1940 to promote an Axis of (German) classicism and (Italian) Re­nais­sance humanism. But Grassi’s hopes for cultural exchanges between Nazis and Fascists ­were not Aryan enough for Alfred Rosenberg, a propagandist l­ater hanged at Nuremberg. Rosenberg’s gangsters tried to quash Heidegger’s statement b ­ ecause it treated all humanisms, including “German po­liti­cal humanism,” as bankrupted by metaphysics. Only Mussolini’s personal intervention, seconded by Goebbels, saved Grassi’s proj­ect.47 Heidegger, even before he resigned as rector of Freiburg in 1934, had made enemies in the Party. He also off ended colleagues and friends in the university, especially Karl Jaspers, whose expulsion from teaching in 1937 drew no comment from him. In late 1945, when this old friend of Jaspers was fishing for a n ew connection with Sartre, Jaspers made a d amning report to Freiburg’s university senate: ­because he found “Heidegger’s mode of thinking . . . ​fundamentally unfree, dictatorial and uncommunicative, . . . ​it would be quite wrong to turn such a teacher loose on the young ­people of ­today.” The French authorities agreed: they had Heidegger fired and cut his pension—­until more cautious counsel intervened. The nightmare that provoked the French was Heidegger giving philosophy lessons to Sartre—­France’s hero, who had been a German pow and then an under­ ground journalist, risking his life to subvert the Hun.48



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Some of this had not yet happened and much was still invisible to Garin when he wrote the last chapter of the Vallecchi History, where Jaspers and Heidegger take center stage together. In Garin’s account, Jaspers—­called a Christian existentialist by Sartre—­stands in the same moral space with Heidegger, who “acknowledges the drama of religion but understands it as exclusively as a ­human drama.” The groupings are odd—in light of the speech by Sartre that Garin had not yet read. Sartre puts Heidegger first among the “atheist intellectuals, . . . ​a lso including the French existentialists and myself.” He also identifies Marcel along with Jaspers as both existentialist and Christian—­just as Lavelle and Le Senne, the only French thinkers listed with Marcel by Garin, ­were Christian. “Consolidating existentialism in a single definition is not easy,” as Garin explained, “since it indicates not so much a precise position as a tendency now shared by vari­ ous currents of philosophy.” 49 Although he found Lavelle and Le Senne more relevant than Marcel in 1945, Garin treated ­these vague tendencies as all of a piece: “In the diverse plurality of its themes, existentialism has led philosophical thinking back to urgent h ­ uman prob­lems that abstract intellectualism has tended to leave in the shadows.” Existentialism may have been nebulous, but it was a Good ­Thing, overcoming abstraction to achieve concretezza. This might be a plausible reading of Sartre’s Paris lecture, unknown to Garin in 1945, but it seems far-­fetched if applied to the charter text of existentialism that he had certainly read—­Being and Time, which contains many sentences like this: “So far as Being makes up what is asked about, and Being states the Being of a being, the being turns out to be just what is questioned in the question of Being.”50 But Garin’s touchstone for concreteness in 1945 was still the “concrete thought thinking” of Giovanni Gentile, who wrote many sentences like this one, already cited: “The positive is posited not as the result of a pro­cess already finished and done, . . . ​[only] in that it posits itself actually by getting back into the being that is, in that it thinks itself.” Garin agreed that the thinking that thinks itself—­pensiero pensante—is self-­creating autoctisis, than which nothing could be more concrete ­because this thinking was the purest kind, the act that was the kernel of Gentile’s actualism. And that doctrine, the brainchild of Italian Fascism’s mastermind, was also a source of Italian existentialism, according to Luporini. What about French existentialism: Could that movement in its early days—­rather than the odious Heidegger’s system or Luporini’s blend with its actualist

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ingredients—­have been a h appier backdrop for Garin’s discovery of an existentialist Pico?51 No. As already noted, the postwar Garin traced the existentialist line from Pico straight to Sartre, whom he did not know and cannot have known ­until ­after 1945, when he described existentialism in the Vallecchi History. The French who figure briefly in this account are e­ ither minor players, Lavelle and Le Senne, or a luminary whom Garin found dull: Marcel. What tormented t­ hese anguished Christians? Could their e­ arlier ideas have pushed them—­and Garin—­toward existentialism? Perhaps. And did the French philosophize about religion before Sartre? Of course. In fact, Maurice Blondel, a controversial theologian, has been described as anticipating the “­later existentialist critique of essentialism.”52 Blondel defended his thesis at the Sorbonne in 1893. He titled it Action: ­Toward a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice. The topic is as stated—­ action, seen as a b etter route than philosophy to transcendence. Life requires us to act and to choose. Disappointment with our choices drives us inexorably to other actions, again and again—­new actions of being, knowing, and willing. Failed acts of ­will are cases of la volonté voulue, leaving our only hope in la volonté voulante, the aspirational ‘­will willing’ that reaches beyond the inadequate objects of ‘willed w ­ ill’ through the ‘supreme option’ ­toward divinity itself. The willing ­will that overcomes contradictions and frustrations of choice is immanent in the willing subject whose action in God’s presence must ultimately be passive, submitting to divine grace.53 Le Senne and Lavelle ­were followers and friends of Blondel, who also influenced Marcel—­indeed, every­one in France who thought seriously about religion in the early twentieth ­century. Lavelle’s ideas, presented in 1937 in his book On the Act, have been described as a “ philosophy of action,” a notion familiar to Gentile’s readers in ­those days. Deeper currents that may have flowed into Gentile’s actualism from Blondel’s theory of action show up in a striking parallel—­between la volonté voulue versus la volonté voulante in France before the ­Great War and pensiero pensato versus pensiero pensante in Mussolini’s Italy. That Blondel helped forge this key to Gentile’s thought seems plausible in light of Gentile’s adventures with Modernism, a heresy concocted by neoscholastic reactionaries who feared Blondel b ­ ecause he taught that Christians must choose and change in order to act. Pius X declared Modernism a heresy in 1907 in Feeding the Lord’s Flock, an encyclical that sent God’s sheep to graze on flummery. In the words of



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a recent account, “if Modernism is . . . ​a coherent system of thought, no such ­thing existed prior to the encyclical.” Of the errors denounced by the pope in Pascendi, the one that bears most on Blondel and Gentile is ‘immanentism’: an inward religion of the heart is sinful if it risks subjective perversions of immutable faith. The only pious philosophy is a philosophia perennis, static and beyond history, whose theorems have been posited by scripture, proved by scholastic philosophy, and promulgated by tradition. This is not Hegelian historicism, which tracks the Spirit unfolding in time, nor Gentile’s Hegelianism. Nor is it consistent with Blondel’s advice about active willing and choosing. As a l ay theologian, Blondel was not the Church’s target in 1907, but a­ fter the pope spoke, he published nothing for nearly three de­cades.54 In Italy the editors of Il Rinnovamento—­Antonio Fogazzaro, Salvatore Minocchi, and Giovanni Semeria—­took positions censured by the encyclical. In 1909 their journal was suppressed. Two years before, Ernesto Buonaiuti had dared to reply to Pascendi. The Vatican put his book on the Index in 1908 and eventually excommunicated him. Gentile joined the debate early, first by discussing Semeria’s work in 1903, then in 1906 dealing with Lucien Laberthonnière—­who at the time was a follower of Blondel. In 1908 Gentile addressed the encyclical itself. Taking the strident secular tone that Italians call laicismo, his first two statements had charged the Modernists only with intellectual sins of incoherence. But Gentile’s last word in 1908 was a turnabout, praising the pope’s letter as “a masterful exposition and a m agnificent criticism of all of Modernism’s philosophical princi­ ples.” Papini—­still unconverted—­was not amused, but the Jesuits of Civiltà Cattolica ­were giddy. Gentile’s snaky reasoning is hard to follow, perhaps tracking his evolving views on Hegelian metaphysics and historicism, just at the time when Croce was attacking ­those doctrines. For our purposes, the issue is not the content of Gentile’s response to Modernism, but that ­there was such a response at all, including many comments about Blondel, the unwitting progenitor not only of Modernism but also of much of the French philosophizing about religion that preceded French existentialism. To repeat a question already asked: Was it that ­earlier and less-­burdened movement—­ not Heidegger’s phenomenology or Luporini’s ideas—­that first convinced Garin to make Pico an existentialist?55 Even if this w ­ ere so—­which is not likely—­Gentile had been ­there first, sorting out Blondel and his followers for an Italian audience before Garin

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was born. And in the year when Gentile entered the Scuola Normale, Blondel’s Sorbonne thesis of 1893 had presented a philosophy of action that anticipated the structure (though not the ethics) of Gentile’s actualism: thought thinking and ­will willing, two metaphysical peas in a pod. Other­wise, before World War II and outside the framework of actualism, ­there was l­ ittle access for Italians to a French existentialism or even, from across the Alps, a proto-­existentialist philosophy of religion. Gentile, however, was always already t­ here for Garin. The younger phi­ los­o­pher entered the University of Florence in 1925, just sixteen years old, when Gentile’s power in the Fascist regime had not yet peaked. He founded the Giornale Critico in 1920 and published the fourth edition of his General ἀ eory in 1924. ­Later, in a p olemical preface to the fifth edition of 1938, he attacked a former student and another Fascist, Ugo Spirito, for straying into dissent. Threatening his critics, he proclaimed that actualism is “always t­ here, right in front of ­these brave champions of Italian philosophy, ready to beset them, upset them and frighten them.” While actualism still ruled Italian philosophy, its inventor mocked his challengers by presenting his system as a specter haunting the peninsula. He also published shorter and less-­agitated statements to make his abstractions digestible to the reading public. Th ­ ese philosophical essays w ­ ere propaganda for an ideology and a movement.56 ­Until ­after World War II, ­there was no such movement to promote existentialism, e­ ither in Italy or anywhere else—­not ­until Sartre went onstage in October 1945, sparking “the first media craze of the postwar period.” By that time Garin realized that something big was stirring, but he traced the hubbub to “vari­ous philosophical currents” lacking any “exact direction.” Moreover, although he located “the outstanding feature of t­ oday’s thinking . . . ​in currents of existentialism,” none of t­ hose streams, by his own account, ran deep in Italy, where the ­great confluence was Gentile versus Croce and where no Italian was called an ‘existentialist’—by Garin’s Vallecchi History. Since Croce and Gentile w ­ ere celebrities, however, the “popu­lar” audience addressed by Garin’s book would recognize them—­likewise Heidegger, the living phi­los­o­pher who got most of the attention in Garin’s chapter on existentialism. Marcel, named just once, was also prominent by 1945—­but not Lavelle or Le Senne. Unlike Sartre, neither would ever become un homme médiatique, nor would Abbagnano or Luporini, the Italians most often linked with Garin’s turn to existentialism. One



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attraction of such a c onversion—to lighten the weight of his patron’s actualism on statements made by Garin before 1947—­was Sartre’s fame, a postwar phenomenon. In ­those heady days, “at the start of a n ew ‘liberty,’ ” only the clerisy would have noticed Garin’s responses to Italian thinkers less celebrated than Croce and Gentile. And his own claim to fame was a book about Pico, another celebrity. Altering his views on the prince needed stronger mea­ sures than any existentialism could provide u ­ ntil Sartre channeled its “currents” into an international sensation. W ­ hether a y ounger Garin, before 1937, was aware of any existentialism at all—­a “religious existentialism” or a “positive existentialism”—is hard to know, and much w ­ ill turn on what one means by ‘existentialism.’ Unlike most philosophies, this one has a birthday that can be marked on a calendar—­October 29, the day of Sartre’s speech in 1945. But when professors teach their students about existentialism, they often start ­earlier—as Garin did—­with thinkers who never heard of a philosophy called ‘existentialism’: Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietz­sche, and ­others. Looking for roots is helpful: Anaxagoras sheds light on Socrates, Augustine clarifies Aquinas, Wolff illuminates Kant. But roots are not trees. The dialectic that tests a philosophy and makes it worth debating cannot gather energy u ­ ntil the dialectic engages a discernible target—­something to shoot at and clearly labeled, like ‘behaviorism,’ ‘positivism,’ ‘pragmatism,’ and other controversial favorites of the prewar period. Sartre supplied a target ­after the war and branded it, making existentialism more useful to Garin than ever before—­but only ­after the war.57

4. ​Against ‘Humanism’ A recent textbook on humanism in Pico’s era describes his Oration as a “concise statement of the Re­nais­sance philosophy of man at its height.” As for the author, his “vision is unpre­ce­dented”; with “era-­defining originality,” his words “look ahead to the existentialism of modern times.” Why attach Pico to a modern ideology? To be sure, his celebrity now rests on his speech, but the speech was a call to transcend the ­human world—­misread as a proclamation of h ­ uman dignity. This modern idea, imposed on a premodern text, has given content to a “Re­nais­sance philosophy of man” at the cost of confusing two ‘humanisms.’ One of them, an ideology unknown before the Enlightenment, was named ‘humanism’ by advocates

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and opponents only in the nineteenth ­century, when the word was introduced in its polemical application. Since then, experts on the Re­nais­sance have also ascribed a d if­fer­ent ‘humanism’ to Pico and his Quattrocento contemporaries, who never used the word.58 What’s in a na me? Surely Pico, Poliziano, and their friends—­without explic­itly calling themselves ‘humanists’—­did t­ hings that ‘humanism’ now signifies to students of the Re­nais­sance. But Pico’s subject was philosophy, a field concerned—­not to say obsessed—­with making words and names explicit. The consequences of using ‘humanism’ carelessly can be seen in its treatment by a living phi­los­o­pher who knows a ­great deal about the past but treats the “fabled phenomenon of Re­nais­sance Platonism as peripheral.” Suspicious of “so-­called Re­nais­sance humanism,” he classifies “so-­called Re­nais­sance phi­los­o­phers” as “heterodox,” while allowing that “it is perhaps too much to say that t­ here is no philosophy in authors like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.” He warns prospective readers of his book that “aficionados of humanism, or the wild and wooly ideas of Re­nais­sance Platonism—­will want to find another guide to ­these centuries.”59 Is humanism like cigars or cat fancying—­fun for aficionados but not serious enough for phi­los­o­phers? The language of t­ hese remarks—­“ fabled,” “so-­called,” “wild and wooly”—is polemical and contemptuous. But a deeper worry is dif­fer­ent: that the use of ‘humanism’ by experts on postmedieval culture—­philosophy included—is a cause not of condescension but of confusion. The confusion is of several types: taxonomical, narrative, ideological, and philosophical—at least. And they confuse one another. The taxonomical question—­about who the phi­los­o­phers are—­emerges in Pico’s speech when he denies “that no one or only a few should do philosophy.” Although his main objection is to “­those who make a habit of condemning the study of philosophy,” he also refuses to accept that “only a few” can be phi­los­o­phers. Since his Oration claims this role for himself over and over, why should a phi­los­o­pher insinuate ­today that “­there is no philosophy in authors like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola”? Obviously, ­there is no philosophy of some kinds in Pico’s writings—­analytic, behaviorist, existentialist, naturalist, post-­structuralist, and many o ­ thers—­but no one such kind is the same as philosophy itself.60 Still, in the Anglophone world, one kind dominates, the analytic kind, whose canon is restrictive, shaping the curricula of universities, setting directions for research, and guiding communication. ­These are practical ­matters that need tending to—by resolving confusions, for example. If



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experts on the Re­nais­sance cannot agree on what a ‘humanist’ might have been in t­ hose days, can more be asked of their critics—or their allies? In the New York Times, an amiable columnist recently remarked that “­little boys and girls in ancient Athens grew up wanting to be phi­los­o­phers. In Re­nais­sance Florence they dreamed of becoming humanists.” No: when Pico was a b oy, Italian intellectuals like himself did not call themselves umanisti, nor did they have the concepts now carried by that freighted word. Nonetheless, ascribing to p ­ eople of Pico’s era some or all of what the term means ­today may be correct—or not correct. A prior question of method, tangled in terminology, is not ­whether ­there was any humanism or what it was. Instead, one can ask if the Re­nais­sance might be studied better without a word—­‘ humanism’—­which is now central to its lexicon. Terminology and taxonomy are impor­tant, and they do not stand alone: words are deeds. ‘Humanism’ is so much a fixture in modern conversations about the Re­nais­sance that dropping the word would be a de ed of some moment.61 From contested sorting and labeling comes narrative confusion, as in the story of postmedieval philosophy just before Descartes. This tale has been told as a strug­gle between humanism and scholasticism, even though celebrated works of the time—­works that ­ought to register such a conflict—­ show no sign of it. A credible account must do justice to such writings by Agricola, Descartes, Erasmus, the early Jesuits, Montaigne, More, Petrarch, and Ramus. But where the humanist-­versus-­scholastic antithesis operates, no sound account can be given of ­these works, and the same goes for postmedieval philosophy in general. For phi­los­o­phers, the ‘humanist’ side of the divide is a s pecial hindrance. Whose humanism is it—­a modern ideology, a s ecularism not found in premodern culture? Are the few p ­ eople actually called ‘humanists’ by sixteenth-­century thinkers better seen as philologists or classicists, carry­ing no baggage from humanism? ­These pioneers of philology in the Re­nais­sance, as Jacob Brucker wrote long ago, sought “to find better tools for laboring at philosophy.” Experts ­today should know the old tools and their uses, realizing that the ‘humanist’ label distorts the enterprise.62 The main locus of ideological confusion is the long-­standing debate about ­human dignity, still a hot topic for l­awyers, phi­los­o­phers, po­liti­cal theorists, and theologians. B ­ ecause Kant in­ven­ted the modern concept, Pico could say nothing about it. Yet ­t here he is in a b ig new book on

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dignity, starring in a chapter on “­human dignity in the Re­nais­sance.” The author is careful, however, knowing that appeals to Pico’s missing account of dignity are commonplace (not to say habitual and formulaic) in the con­ temporary lit­er­a­ture on the subject. Describing ‘humanism’ as “any philosophy which recognizes the value or dignity of man,” he cites the specialists in order to accommodate the “historical specificity of Re­nais­sance humanism.” Yet he finds such distinctions helpless against an “indelible popu­lar image of the Re­nais­sance” that takes humanism to be a “ turn t­ owards humanity,” bringing “pro­gress ­toward modernization . . . ​by secularization.” The author, a specialist on Spinoza, has no ­great stake in the Re­nais­ sance. This makes his verdict all the weightier, as he remarks on the “confusion that makes it difficult for us to gauge what Re­nais­sance authors are up to when they sing the praises of man’s dignity and excellence.” 63 Kant’s ideas—­not Pico’s—­were the matrix of ­later ideological mishandlings of h ­ uman dignity and thereby of humanism. In Pico’s case, the basic philosophical misunderstandings ­were Gentile’s and, l­ater, Garin’s, responding to Sartre and Heidegger. When the excitement about Sartre’s speech reached Italy, Garin was one of the enthralled. His book on Pico— by then nearly ten years old—­had nothing to say about existentialism, nor much about any modern philosophy. The only (then) current philosophical ideas in it reflect, in a faint way, Gentile’s actualism. In 1945, with the war over and Gentile dead, other phi­los­o­phers could go back to philosophizing. That Garin should want to return to Pico and youthful glory while shedding the burden of actualism is unsurprising. Sartre’s talk showed Garin and the world a way out. Was it practicality or philosophy that led him to that path? Both, very likely. The philosophy announced in Paris had po­liti­cal appeal and—as Garin would see it—­ historical standing. In l­ater years he described Sartre as repeating Pico “almost to the letter.” His claim, though very exciting, cannot be right. He certainly understood that Sartre’s thinking could make no sense without Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietz­sche, Husserl, and Heidegger. Why pack them all, along with Sartre and Pico, into the same conceptual and moral space? Any humanism—as a philosophical m ­ atter—­remains problematic ­today. Two renowned phi­los­o­phers (Heidegger and Sartre) quarreled about it, raising questions that have never been settled. But a third phi­los­o­pher (Garin), who was also a distinguished historian, chose sides and attributed



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one of the conflicting positions to Pico, the best-­k nown phi­los­o­pher of the Re­nais­sance. In ­today’s Anglophone world, however, Pico’s standing as a phi­los­o­pher is shaky. And in the small universe of Re­nais­sance studies, some experts balk at calling him a humanist, even though this is now his public identity, especially when dignity is up for debate.64 Phi­los­o­pher, humanist, celebrity? Only the last description holds securely for Pico, whose fame has been manipulated and distorted for 500 years, sometimes with malice. His nephew, when he put Pico’s writings in print, manipulated his ­uncle’s letters to match the pious Life that he wrote—­a ­family hagiography. ­After the prince’s sainthood was revoked in the Enlightenment and Voltaire called him a lunatic, o ­ thers restored his honor by turning him into a Cartesian liberator and then a proleptic Kantian, flying a banner of ­human dignity and modernity. ­Later a Jesuit propagandist (Oreglia) debased his memory by smearing it with the blood libel, before another phi­los­o­pher (Gentile) sanitized the tale again by updating the Kantian Pico for Italian Hegelians.65 What­ever ‘humanism’ signifies, the word has not clarified Pico’s story. Since the story has depended so much on the word—­and vice versa—­ maybe we can do better. While metaphysics rules, a ­human essence can never be recovered by any humanism: that was Heidegger’s conclusion at the end of arguments that cross the line between difficulty and obscurity, not least by relying on eccentric terms of art like ‘Dasein’ or coinages like ‘ek-­sistence.’ For experts on the Re­nais­sance his bespoke vocabulary is a caution, since what ‘humanist’ and ‘humanism’ say to them is not what t­ hese words say to the world.66 Think of the New York Times columnist and the Florentine c­ hildren who “dreamed of becoming humanists.” Think of another columnist defending humanism in the same newspaper as “a pedagogy and a worldview,” the latter taking form as philosophy, method, and morality. “It is all a ­little inchoate,” he grants, where ‘inchoate’ seems to mean not ‘incipient’ or ‘imperfect’ but ‘confused’: “­Human, humane, humanities, humanism, humanitarianism; but t­ here is nothing shameful or demeaning about any of it.” Surely not. And yet mixups about ‘humanism’ might be embarrassing. Think of the Spinoza expert who senses confusion in conversations about ­human dignity in the Re­nais­sance. The confusions are prob­lems for experts. What needs fixing is expert terminology, not ordinary language, which ­will take care of itself—­tended

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by blogs and newspapers. Addressing the issue still more recently, the columnist who wrote about childish dreams of humanism called it a “worldview” that promotes beauty as a “ big, transformational t­ hing, the proper goal of art and maybe civilization itself.” The task of this “viewpoint” or “philosophy” is large and vital, he claimed: it must contend with the “post-­ humanism” that a fellow columnist decried ­because it starves beauty and depletes meaning by treating all value as impersonal, fundamentally material, and mea­sured by data—­what Kant called ‘price,’ in other words, not at all the value seen by Kant as the ‘dignity’ distinctive of h ­ umans.67 Pico, whose Oration is ­silent about ­human dignity, said a ­great deal elsewhere in defense of the special words that phi­los­o­phers use. Ever since Petrarch, critics of philosophy—­Renaissance intellectuals now called ‘humanists’—­had denounced this specialist practice for violating classical usage. In this polemical way but also in ­others that ­were more productive, the Re­nais­sance humanism talked about t­ oday was certainly a c lassicism—at least as plausibly as Sartre’s existentialism was a humanism. Why not call it that—­classicism—­and forget about all the humanisms, except insofar as some are prob­lems of modern philosophy, not Re­nais­sance philosophy? L ­ ittle harm would be done and maybe some good.68

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Pico Sainted . . . ​warre continuall against ye worlde, ye flesh, ye dev­i ll. —­t h oma s mor e , translating Pico

1. ​Practicing Death From the generation a­ fter Pico, the most famous figure now called a ‘humanist’ is Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Older books about him are full of aff ecting portraits, like this one tracing the course of his friendship with Thomas More: Erasmus was drawn to More by piety and wit. More was a gay saint, as disciplined as the most conscientious monk, yet with merriment of countenance and a relish for pranks. The rogue took Erasmus for a stroll and then, without warning, dropped in on . . . ​t he ­children of Henry VII. . . . ​How much did Erasmus owe to this new circle of friends? His chief debt was personal. He was exhilarated by their approbation and uplifted by their example, . . . ​ready to forfeit station and reputation for what they deemed to be true and right. . . . ​A lengthy stay . . . ​[brought] an opportunity to share in the life of More’s charming domestic circle.

­ fter ­England, a ­later stop on the scholar’s travels was Strasbourg, where A he enjoyed “an ovation from the literary circle, . . . ​the fraternity of scholars. . . . ​Why did the Strasbourg circle so adulate Erasmus? . . . ​Was it . . . ​ the Praise of Folly?  . . . ​Erasmus was . . . ​the fusion of the Christian man and the cultivated man, the foe of the barbarian, . . . ​the prophet of simplicity, urbanity and piety.” Th ­ ese statements describe states of mind and intersubjective experience. How could such t­ hings enter the historical 159

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rec­ord? ­Because Erasmus revealed so much about himself, his friends, and his enemies in personal and quasi-­personal letters, often expecting them to be circulated or even published: he was that famous in his own day. Thousands of his letters survive—­far more than the few dozen still left from Pico’s correspondence.1 Written by the premier stylist of the age, t­ hese letters became models for ­people who communicated in Latin. ­Later they supplied evidence for ‘life and letters’ biographies, still popu­lar in the nineteenth c­ entury. In 1873 Robert Drummond, a U nitarian minister, used them to produce Erasmus: His Life and Character as Shown in His Correspondence and Works. The letters showed Drummond that More’s first encounter with Erasmus was happy and genial: every­t hing was aff ection, amusement, friendship, humor, laughter, warmth, and wit. Both More and Erasmus ­were renowned for wit. Punning on his friend’s name, Erasmus built a joke into the title of his masterpiece, Moriae Encomium, the Praise of Folly. Many ­were amused, including a pope, Leo X, who “chuckled” at the book—­according to the same biographer who certified that More was a “gay saint” with a “relish for pranks.”2 When he presented More with the Folly, Erasmus had come a long way from his ­earlier Antibarbarians, where good letters underwrite the good life. Folly—­the voice of the ­later book—­mentions good letters only once. She has nothing to say about learning as h ­ uman or humane. Philosophy gets its share of abuse, however: phi­los­o­phers are sour dogmatizers, wordy, obscure and evasive, trying to hide their flaws but failing. Not even the ancient sages had anything useful to say. But Folly’s indictment of philosophy, past and pre­sent, is a lampoon. Her harshest complaint makes a string of technical terms look silly by mocking them out of context.3 She also caricatures ­lawyers, poets, rhetoricians, and other learned professionals before savaging the powers that be, clerical and civil. Some wayward intellectuals provoke her even more than philosophers—­grammarians (grammatici) and writers (scriptores) especially. ­These haughty schoolmasters torment their students and coddle their peers: they expect toadying to be repaid by fatuous praise for trivial findings—­sometimes stolen. Phi­los­ o­phers get less grief from Folly than ­these scribblers. We call them ‘humanists,’ though she does not.4 Folly personified was the mask that Erasmus wore to cover his foolish praises of folly, a per­for­mance complicated by irony. Most of her sermon is a cascade of jokes about her retinue of fools—­nothing too weighty, just



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virtuoso wit in sublime prose. Then the last part of the satire—­little more than a tenth of the whole—­turns serious, making this case: Platonic dualism is the metaphysics ­behind a m oral psy­chol­ogy that justifies a discipline—­practical, redemptive meditation—­sacralized in the Eucharist, whose vis­i­ble signs (bread, wine and the ritual that transforms them) signify the death of Christ.5 To prepare for death, phi­los­o­phers must meditate on it and imitate Christ by renouncing the flesh: righ­teous philosophy is this training for death, a w ise folly that seeks detachment from the body on the way to ecstasy. Erasmus remembers that Plato defined philosophy “as practicing death (mortis meditatio) ­because it leads the mind away from vis­i­ble and bodily ­things—­doing just as death does. . . . ​When the chains have been broken, the mind strug­gles to declare itself ­free, as if planning an escape from prison, and then they call it madness. . . . ​Yet we see such ­people predicting the f­ uture, understanding tongues and scripts never before learned by them, in an absolutely godlike show. This happens, no doubt, ­because the mind starts to use its native strength as it gains a bit more freedom from the body’s contagion.” Up to a point, Socrates made the same case in the Phaedo: philosophy is the “practice of death” that teaches the soul to salvage its bodiless nature, which is good and godlike, by separating from the flesh, whose vis­i­ble substance is corrupt and foul, like a c orpse. But when the soul departs to find what is “invisible, divine, deathless and wise,” it leaves ­behind not only error, fear, and animal passion—­according to Socrates—­but also anoia or “folly.” According to Erasmus, however, the rapturous mania that brings gifts of tongues and prophecy is a blessed folly and an attainment of the au­then­tic philosophy that practices death.6 The Folly’s mad asceticism is worse than harsh—it is hardhearted. Loving a child or a parent is a defective passion that needs to be redeemed by (somehow) sublimating it in the love of Christ. Embodied love is always defective and must be spiritualized. Forsaking the flesh makes the saints seem insane, however: they appear to be “outside themselves”—­ecstatic, as they truly are. The saved enjoy the ultimate ecstasy in heaven, where “the spirit w ­ ill be absorbed by the Supreme Mind, and the person w ­ ill be totally outside himself.” Drowning the self in the Godhead’s bottomless sea is a commonplace of Christian mysticism, and yet the notion is jarring, like a related claim—­that madness leading to self-­extinction is genuinely divine.7 ­Going mad for God by denying the flesh, escaping the body, repressing aff ection, practicing death, and extinguishing the self seems a l ong way

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from exhilaration, fraternity, and merriment. What did Erasmus want? To flee the world or joke about it? Part of the puzzle is too much information. From so much eyewitness testimony, many true stories can be told, revealing the complexity and contradictions of character. Perspectives also shift: secularism has made our world utterly unlike the place where More and Erasmus lived, always immersed in piety.8

2. ​Two Epistolaries and a Hagiography More translated three of the forty-­seven letters by Pico that the prince’s nephew made public in 1496. First printed a year before Pico’s epistolary, Marsilio Ficino’s much larger correspondence includes hundreds of items covering more than two de­cades of his life, presented in the order of their writing (more or less) and arranged in twelve books. Some letters are ­really essays or short treatises, often on moral philosophy or theology. This collection, collected by Ficino, is literary artifice, meant not just to preserve messages between him and his correspondents but also to pre­sent himself and them to the world.9 Fourteen letters in Ficino’s epistolary are addressed by him to Pico; one letter was sent to him by Pico; and fourteen o ­ thers mention Pico. The letters are printed in chronological order, though not strictly, and some are undated. Unlike the letters that Ficino arranged for himself, the forty-­ seven arranged for Pico by his nephew diff er very greatly in their textual sequence—­though not all are dated—­from their temporal sequence. Less than a te nth come from the three years—1487, 1488, and 1489—­t hat account for nearly two-­thirds of the letters to Pico in Ficino’s published correspondence.10 Why should this be? Faced with apparent disorder in Pico’s letters, Garin—­who first sorted them by chronology—­called the collection “chaotic,” which might be all ­there is to say. Maybe Gianfrancesco sent the printer a b undle of letters just as he found them. ­After all, he classified them with his ­uncle’s minor works. He says this in a headnote to the letters and miscellaneous writings, among which lesser items he also placed the text for which Pico is now best known—­the Oration. Gianfrancesco’s headnote comes a­ fter the Heptaplus, the Apology, and On Being and the One in the first volume of his 1496 collection, introduced by his Life of Pico; the Disputations against Astrology fill a second volume, which carries a dif­fer­ent (and mistaken) date of publication in 1495.11



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In the Life, Gianfrancesco says that he found the letters with other loose papers including a Psalms commentary and the Oration. This was the speech that Pico “would have delivered in Rome if the debate had happened.” Gianfrancesco gives it no title and says nothing about its message. From his headnote to the letters and minor works, however, we learn why he paid so ­little attention to the speech that would come to mean so much to so many admirers of his ­uncle. “Accept ­these studies also,” he asks the reader, works that gave him l­ ittle trou­ble, and ­were he alive, he might not have published them, nor would I, had distinguished ­people not urged and exhorted me. First, you ­w ill read an oration of the utmost elegance that was actually written in youthful haste, though scholars often admire it as the pinnacle of learning and eloquence. Do not be disturbed if many ­t hings at the end of it are seen to be the same as ­t hose inserted into the Apology as an introduction. Although he made the latter work public, he always kept the former private and shared it with no one but his friends. You ­will see that he has very cleverly uncovered many recondite teachings of the ancients previously shrouded in fables and riddles. He strove mightily and with charms of oratory to show how the poetic theology of ancient sages was handmaid to the mysteries of our theology, and he tried to induce ­people to intellectual combat by unraveling certain tangles of both. At that time he was an avid student of such ­matters, ­later abandoning them as trivial squabbles and preliminaries to serious study, as he moved on to what I have already published and then turned his attention to the eff orts that I ­shall publish. You ­w ill also find a se­lection of letters (since it would have been too difficult to collect them all): some are personal, written both when he was young and when he was older, while ­others, composed ­after he had given his ­whole heart to God, are filled with admonishments of the greatest holiness. You w ­ ill discover that the former are richly redolent of learning and eloquence, but from the latter, above and beyond their strong flavor of both t­ hose qualities, you w ­ ill also perceive that they breathe out the love of Christ in ­great abundance.

What do we learn? That in Gianfrancesco’s view • the minor works—­including the letters—­are eloquent and learned, but the message most valued is the minatory piety of the ­later material, “filled with admonishments of the greatest holiness”;

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• the Apology is a major work that Gianfrancesco has “already published,” namely, in the first part of the first volume of his edition, before the headnote that introduces the second part; • the Oration is a minor work without a title—­clever, eloquent and exotic but hasty and juvenile, published by Gianfrancesco against his better judgment ­after his ­uncle had kept it to himself; • “intellectual combat” and “trivial squabbles”—­like the disputatious Conclusions introduced by the Oration but not published by Gianfrancesco—­distracted Pico in his misspent youth, when he wrote the speech. Strictly speaking, since the Conclusions had already been published, Gianfrancesco did not need to print them again, even though it was ­these 900 t­ heses that required the Apology which he did publish, along with the De ente et uno and Heptaplus—­the last also already in print. The unfin­ ere to be another ished Disputations, “the eff orts that I s­ hall publish,” w large part of his u ­ ncle’s public legacy, in the second volume of the 1496 collection.12 Most impor­tant—­the “note on the Oration and letters of Giovanni Pico” by Gianfrancesco tells us this: what­ever the nephew was thinking as he assembled his ­uncle’s writings, he was not thinking of Pico as we now think of him, as the author of an epochal speech about the dignity of man. In fact, this young man, not yet thirty nor yet known as a c hampion of anti-­philosophical Chris­tian­ity—­while Savonarola was holding Florence spellbound—­saw his brilliant u ­ ncle as a r eformed sinner and a piagnone saint, like other ‘weepers’ mesmerized by the friar’s preaching. He tells us so in the biography that introduces his 1496 collection of Pico’s Commentationes—­ ‘thoughts,’ ‘studies,’ or ‘writings.’ Gianfrancesco returned to this usage several times in his Life, once in the phrase ‘incomplete studies’: he seems to have thought of his u ­ ncle’s ­career as a work in pro­gress cut short.13 But spiritual failure was a greater threat. In the Life, ambition and sensuality nearly destroy Pico, despite advantages of birth and prodigious talents. His quest for intellectual glory put him on the primrose path of philosophy and exposed him to worldly h ­ azards. Holier wisdom rescued him only a­ fter he renounced the flesh. When enemies deflated his self-­regard, he changed his life, having learned that glory is hollow, power is illusory, and w ­ omen are traps for sinners. Then he pledged himself to charity for the



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poor, the study of scripture, and the welfare of the Church. Renouncing ­carnal plea­sure and intellectual pride, he turned away from the world. But zeal for philosophy still drove him from one debate to another u ­ ntil he found such contests too repugnant, wishing in secret to change his wandering scholar’s journeys for the paths of a p ilgrim preacher—­like the young Savonarola. Pico died a holy yet flawed Christian death, followed by a terrifying postmortem—­a grisly vision of the philosopher-­prince burning in purgatory (Figure 6).

Figure 6. ​“The Torments of Hell,” Seelenwurzgarten, 1483.

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To tell this story, Gianfrancesco began with disclaimers of favoritism before turning to his ­uncle’s ­family, birth, and education, while also noting his “generally good looks.” Then he gave as much attention to a shorter period—­the two years or so spoiled by the prince’s Roman disaster and its aftermath, events presented as pivotal by the biography. The savagery of his ­uncle’s enemies turned out to be a saving grace, ending his trou­bles with a blessed conversion. Spiteful p ­ eople who made false charges against him set his own errors straight: as he wandered in the dark, this dazzling illumination came to him like a radiant beam of light, letting him see how far he had strayed from the true path. ­Until then, in fact, he longed for glory while false love fueled his fires and the wiles of w ­ omen stirred them up. . . . ​But when the hostility woke him up, he pulled his spirit back from dissolute indulgence and turned to Christ, exchanging female charms for the joys of his homeland on high. Ceasing to care for the trifling, glittering glory that he had wanted, he began seeking God’s glory and the welfare of the Church.14

Having put his ­uncle on the road to redemption, Gianfrancesco also examined his writings, giving the longest section of the Life to Pico’s vari­ ous proj­ects, both finished and unfinished. Three works produced and published a­ fter his conversion w ­ ere the nephew’s favorites: the Apology, Heptaplus, and On Being and the One. Among the author’s talents, Gianfrancesco emphasized originality, in­de­pen­dence of mind, and breadth of learning, though character and spiritual achievements came first in a ­family hagiography. To memorialize a saint in the making, the Life hinges on three moments: a fall from brilliant beginnings; conversion and repentance; death, punishment, and fi­nally salvation. While dedicating his 1496 collection to Ludovico Il Moro, Gianfrancesco told the Sforza duke that lives of the saints ­were his model. Although he respected pagan biographies, like Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, he preferred early Christian heroes (Ambrose, Anthony, Martin) remembered by patristic authors (Athanasius, Paulinus, Sulpicius Severus). Like ­these hagiographers, he wrote to “spread God’s glory” and “excite p ­ eople to lead good and blessed lives.” Like tales of the saints, his narrative about the prince is edifying in its structure: a sinner’s errors before conversion are ultimately erased by God’s mercy. His ­uncle’s death and its sequel take up more than a fifth of Gianfrancesco’s Life; then its conclusion focuses on Savonarola, not on Pico. The



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nephew was away from Florence when his ­uncle died, but he returned in time to hear the friar’s callous announcement about him a few days ­later. Preaching in the Duomo on Sunday, November 23, 1494, Savonarola ended his sermon in this way: I want to reveal a secret to you, which ­until now I had not wanted to tell you b ­ ecause ­until ten hours ago I w as not sure enough. I b elieve that each of you knew of Count Giovanni of Mirandola, who was staying ­here in Florence and died a few days ago. I tell you that his soul—­because of prayers from the friars, also some good works that he did in this life and other prayers as well—is in purgatory: pray for him. He was slow and did not come to religion while he lived, as had been hoped, and so he is in purgatory.

This resembles Gianfrancesco’s version of the sermon, which is harsher, however, and a good deal longer. In fact, it is the longest statement ascribed to anyone—­including Pico himself—in the Life. The final sentence of the biography leaves the prince on his way to heaven but not yet ­there, “having long kept com­pany with ­those who dwell in Kedar.” Followers of Savonarola, like Gianfrancesco, would have heard the biblical name in the friar’s sermons. Kedar was outside the promised land in Ishmaelite territory, named by the Psalmist in a cry of distress: in Savonarola’s version, “alas that my wandering in foreign lands has been long, that I have dwelt with ­those that dwell in Kedar and stay ­there, . . . ​ with my soul far away and tarrying in the wilderness.” Pico lived in sin among sinners and was still suff ering in their com­pany: ­these w ­ ere a nephew’s closing comments on his ­uncle.15 Gianfrancesco’s aim at the end of his biography was to defend Savonarola’s public verdict on Pico. He confirmed that his u ­ ncle was burning in purgatory for ingratitude ­because he had ignored God’s summons to a life of religion—to enter a Dominican convent, like Savonarola’s San Marco in Florence. In the delirium of fever that killed him, Pico saw the Virgin and heard her promise his salvation. Savonarola too was a v isionary, whose standing as God’s prophet certified his report on the prince’s torments. But the friar had enemies, as Gianfrancesco knew, and some found his stories ridicu­lous. Gianfrancesco’s response was to endorse the preacher’s cruelty by agreeing that miscreants like his u ­ ncle, even if their sins ­were venial, should be “tortured with fire for failing to keep a vow to enter the religious life.”16

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Like Erasmus in his Folly, who would teach that ­human love is wrong ­ nless it is divinized, Gianfrancesco was hardhearted about his ­uncle’s u duty to love God above all. But he also loved his ­uncle and wrote to defend his reputation. He did his best to put him on the right side of the papacy that condemned his infamous t­ heses, for example, though he surely knew more about the damage done than he reported: he said nothing about Pico’s flight from Italy and confinement in France. Well informed about the Roman debacle, he must have known how the prince shamed his f­ amily in the same period by getting ­people injured and killed in a botched abduction. He hid the antics with Margherita—­his ­uncle’s beloved but married to a Medici cousin—­under a few words about the “handsome body and good looks” that caused “many w ­ omen to fall passionately in love with him when . . . ​he neglected to control himself and lapsed into dissipation.”17 For the Oration’s modern audience, however, the loudest silence in Gianfrancesco’s Life goes by quickly—­t he few words that describe the speech: perspicacissimum ingenium et doctrinam uberrimam redolet. Gianfrancesco praised it as exceedingly intelligent, learned, and eloquent—­ like almost every­thing that his ­uncle put on paper—­but he said nothing at all about its content, nothing to distinguish it from any other piece of writing and nothing about dignitas. In the hagiographic economy of the Life, meant to edify the faithful while honoring a relative, the Oration was worth l­ ittle.18 So very edifying was Gianfrancesco’s hagiography, however, that Thomas More translated it into En­glish and gave it to a young nun to celebrate her seclusion from the world. More explained his pre­sent in this way: “Where as the giftis of other folk declare yt thei wissh their frendes to be worldli fortunate myne testifieth that I desire to have you godly prosperous. Th ­ ese warkis more profitable then large, . . . ​made in latyne by one Iohan picus erle of Mirandula, . . . ​are such that . . . ​ther commeth none in your hande more profitable: neither to thachyuyng of temperance in prosperite, nor to ye purchasing of patience in adversite, nor to the dispising of worldly vanite, nor to the desiring of heuinly felicite.” More sent the novice a few of Pico’s shorter spiritual works as well, all expressing the same dolorous piety that pervades the biography. He also added three letters, one written in 1486 to Andrea Corneo, two in 1492 to Gianfrancesco. Why should a n ew nun, apparently without Latin, want to read this erudite correspondence?19



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3. ​Reading for a Nun Describing More’s Lyfe of Pico, one biographer of the saint connected it with a “spiritual crisis” preceding his decision to marry around 1505. More produced this “brooding” work, we are told, as a gift to a ­family friend who had just left ordinary ­human society for the cloister (Figure  7). Would More have admired this ­later biographer’s Pico, “a learned and devout layman . . . ​[and] an example of the Christian life [of] . . . ​warmhearted lay piety, at home in a cultured world”? Pico was unmarried, however, and the author sensed celibate depression in the “deeply melancholy” verses that More derived from Pico’s poems, lamenting this wretched life [that] . . . . . . ​fast . . . ​r ynneth on and passen ­shall as doth a dreme or shadowe on the wall.

But the personality b ­ ehind ­these somber thoughts was complex: “devout, abstemious, noble, diligent and prolific,” convinced “that h ­ uman beings have ­free ­will and can choose ­whether they ­will rise ­toward God or sink ­toward the beasts. He mocked astrologers for their determinism b ­ ecause he found the dignity of man to lie in the soul’s capacity for choice and its ability to ascend to God.”20 Having summarized ­these familiar claims about Pico’s ideas—­free ­will and ­human dignity defeating astrological determinism—­More’s biographer had nothing to say about their presence in More’s biography of Pico. ­There is nothing to say b ­ ecause More said no such t­ hing. The source and setting of his Lyfe of Iohan Picus explain his silence. When he published the Lyfe, closer to 1510 than 1505, he included “dyvers epistles and other warkis of the seyd . . . ​Picus.” The collection that he presented to a new nun is a devotional anthology whose largest part is more spiritual than historical, more hagiography than biography. Besides the three letters, the other pieces include comments on some Psalms, some spiritual rules, and a prayer—­gifts for a bride of Christ who could take no worldly pre­sents.21 Pico wrote two of t­ hese three letters to his nephew and eventual biographer in 1492, several years ­after the failed Roman disputation. The first weaves the Circe myth into an exhortation against temptation. In More’s En­glish rendering, it disparages “erthly thingis, slypper, uncertaine, vile and commune” and dismisses the “delite . . . ​[that] vexith and tossith . . . ​

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Figure 7. ​“Death Takes a Nun,” Hans Holbein the Younger, 1538.

erthly myndes.” “O the dark myndes of men,” the letter wails, “O the blinde hartis. . . . ​In vaine we wolde pluk oure fote out of ye clay, but we stik styll.” In the same tone, More’s version of Pico’s other letter to his nephew insists that to be scorned by the world is good. “If ye worlde . . . ​hated him by whom ye worlde was made,” he asks, “we most vile and s­ imple men and worthi . . . ​a ll shame and reprofe, if folke bakbyte us, . . . ​shal we . . . ​begin to do yvel? . . . ​The worlde condemneth to life; god exalteth to glori.”22 The third letter that More published, written by Pico to a friend in 1486 before the Roman catastrophe, already prefers the contemplative life to the active and locates “stedfast felicite . . . ​only in the goodnes of the mynde, . . . ​ [not in the] owtward thinges of ye body or of fortune.” Wise phi­los­o­phers



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“dwell with them selfe and be content with the tranquillite of their owne mynde.” Starting with two words not recorded by Pico’s nephew, More adds that they “love liberte: they can not bere ye prowde maners of estates; they can not serue.”23 Additions to Pico’s Latin text are rare in More’s l­ ittle book: deletions are more common. In one of the letters to his nephew, for example, warning him not to follow the wicked and forget his heavenly home, Pico asked this question: Hos emulabimur? Et obliti propriae dignitatis, obliti patriae patrisque caelestis, horum nos ipsi, cum liberi simus nati, ultro mancipia faciemus, et una cum illis misere viventes? S­ hall we emulate them? And having forgotten our own standing, having forgotten our fatherland and heavenly f­ ather, s­ hall we, freeborn though we are, willingly make ourselves slaves to them and live with them in misery?

This is More’s version, with no dignitas: “­Shall we follow them, and forgeting our owne contre hevin and oure own heuinly fathir, wher we ­were fre born, s­ hall we wilfully make oure self their bondemen, . . . ​with them wretchedly liuing? ” Except that Pico’s modern readers have put ­human dignity and freedom at the center of his thought, such small changes in old letters would need l­ ittle notice.24 More’s interest in Pico’s correspondence and Gianfrancesco’s Life has been connected with the saint’s anxiety about plea­sure and his “power­f ul sense of guilt.” A less plausible but more congenial explanation of More’s attraction to Pico—­t hat the prince was his “model of a learned Christian layman”—­has nonetheless entered the textbooks, along with the view that More’s works “dealt with religion only in the 1520s” ­a fter he had turned from secular debates to Catholic apol­o­getics, thus detaching the early More from “true . . . ​Christian humanism.” A dif­fer­ent reading, closer to the facts, links More’s study of Pico with hair shirts and flagellation, the scourging of the flesh that both scholars found healthy for the spirit.25 More, who left a C arthusian monastery not just to re-­enter the world but to rule it as a ­lawyer, member of Parliament, undersheriff of London, and Lord Chancellor of ­England, eventually left the world again as a martyr. This Re­nais­sance hero had meanwhile achieved “self-­fashioning” through “self-­cancellation”—­expressed most famously in the Utopia, where citizens of an ideal state frame laws and customs to shrink the ego

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and eff ace the individual: they prefer shame to guilt as a moral stimulus ­because guilt points too inwardly to the self, not outwardly to o ­ thers.26 Pico’s asceticism, unlike More’s, promotes inwardness b ­ ecause it is mystical, but for the same reason it also encourages self-­cancellation, explic­itly in the Oration, where a world-­fleeing curriculum rises through angel magic and ecstatic Kabbalah to carry the soul up to mystical assimilation in the One. “Gazing up at primeval beauty,” Pico promises, “we ­shall be its winged lovers, ­until at last, driven wild by desire with a love beyond telling, and transported beyond ourselves like burning Seraphs, full of divine power, we ­shall be ourselves no longer, but ­shall be Him, the very One who made us.” Thomas More may have noticed this blissful annihilation of the self in Pico’s speech, but the saint (like many o ­ thers) made no comment about it.27 His scrutiny of Pico’s works was thorough, however. He turned up items, some fragmentary, that only specialists now read. To fill out his austere anthology, he selected comments by Pico on Psalm 15 that contrast the “misery of this worlde” with the felicity of the next: “We s­ hall continually desire to be hens that we be t­ here,” he advises, and “we shulde not only strongly suff re deth . . . ​whan our time commeth . . . ​but . . . ​willingly and gladly longe ther fore, desiring to be departed oute of this vale of wretchidnes.” God alone satisfies; the world always disappoints. Even for the perfect Christian, “ther is one parel, . . . ​lest he wax prowde of his vertue . . . ​ [who] attained [it] . . . ​not by his owne powar but by the powar of god.”28 To forestall such lapses, More versified Pico’s twelve prose rules for “spirituall batail,” starting with a call to warre continuall against ye worlde, ye flesh, ye dev­ill.

The second rule reminds us to think in this wretched worldes besy woo the batail more sharpe and lenger is.

The twelfth and last urges that we should a gainst this pompe and wretched worldes glosse considre how crist the lorde, sovereyne po­were, humbled him selfe for vs vnto the crosse.



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And peraduenture deth with in one howre shal us bereue welth, riches and honowre and bring vs down ful low, both smal and grete, to vile carion and wretched wormes mete.

With ­these morbid rhymes, More ends Pico’s rules in the mood of the treatise On Misery by Lotario dei Segni. He says nothing, however, about the ­human dignitas that Lotario also failed to explore, the topic so often cited in praise of Quattrocento humanism, with Pico as its champion.29 More followed Pico’s rules with twelve brief “wepenis of spiritual bataile,” starting on the dark note that a reader of the anthology would by now expect. The weapons are The plesur litle and short The folowers grief and heuynes The los of a bettir ­t hing This life a dreme and a shadowe The deth at our hand and vnware Ye fere of impenitent departing Eternal ioy, eternal paine Ye nature and dignyte of man Ye peace of a good mynde The gret benefites of god The penyful cros of crist The witnes of martyrs and examples of seyntis

In this anxious litany of brief plea­sure, ensuing grief, loss, illusion, unshriven death impending, and heavenly joy overshadowed by hellish torment, the “nature and dignyte of man” comes as a s urprise—if we understand “dignyte” in a modern way. Where Pico had written only four words, hominis dignitas et natura, More glossed them in rhyming verse: Remembre how god hath made the resonable like vnto his image and figure and for the suff red paines intollerable that he for angell nevir wolde endure. Regarde o man thyne excellent nature. Thou that with angell art made to bene egall for very shame be not the dev­ills thrall.30

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Echoing familiar themes of Christian asceticism, More admonishes ­human sinners: in his own image God made your kind rational, and then by taking incarnate form he suff ered for you, enduring pain that angels could not deserve. Mankind gets “dignyte” from divine gifts of creation and the cross, not from any mortal endowment or achievement. Even while reminding ­humans of their angelic (bodiless, sexless) stature, More threatens them with disgrace if they stoop to the Dev­il’s ser­vice. About ­free w ­ ill, unbounded choice, metaphysical self-­construction, or moral self-­ determination he says nothing. More’s morose anthology ends with one of Pico’s prayers, also expanded and versified. The opening finds man prostrate before a holy god of dredefull magestee . . . which heuen and erth directest all alone. We the beseche, good lorde, with wofull mone: spare vs wretchis and wassh away oure gilt that we be not by thy iust angre spilt.

The prayer, and More’s book, close with the hope that this awful Lord ­will be an indulgent ­father to the good Christian whan the iornay of this dedly life my syly gost hath fynysshed and thense departen must, with owt his flesshly wife, alone in to his lordis high presence.

The Lyfe of Pico that More framed with ­these severe rhymes was a reprimand to the world, an ascetic’s manifesto.31 The vernacular poetry that Pico wrote was lost to More; the four dozen sonnets that survive ­were not recovered ­until 1894. What More learned from Gianfrancesco was that “five bokis that in his youth of wanton versis of loue . . . ​he made in his vulgare tonge: al to gither (in detestation of his vice passed . . . ) he burned.” Even when ­these “wanton versis” speak of love, however, the mood turns dismal; love itself is pain, cruelty and confinement. Th ­ ese are thoughts about mortality from Pico’s sonnets: The soul is entombed in the body; blind is he who puts hope in the world; better to die than live languishing; ­every man dies stripped of his mortal garb.32



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And this is the ­whole of Sonnet 32: If, Lord, you elected me for heaven, let love no longer hold me back from t­ here, nor let the skyward street be worthless to me and gates of Pluto uselessly broke through.

You know that death rules over all of us, that seven times a day the just man falls, that pleasant scenes are happy for the senses, that I am weak, the Adversary strong. You know that you have ­shaped me with your seal, my Lord, in miracle and godlike mastery, and breathed the breath of life into my face. Therefore ignite my heart with love and faith and look for me if from the path I stray— you the shepherd, I the wandering sheep.33 Thomas More believed, ­because Gianfrancesco told him so, that Pico’s Italian poems ­were evidence of a w asted youth, spent on “trifeles” and “other like fantasies.” But Sonnet 32 suggests that Pico could have kept writing vernacular poetry in his l­ater, more spiritual period. Or maybe his ­whole life was such a period—­following the ascetic program of the Oration and Conclusions but with lapses like the Margherita episode.34 What More put into his En­glish Lyfe was what he found in his Latin source—­right or wrong. ­Little in his translation of the biography was invention; it was almost all ­there in Gianfrancesco’s pious and adulatory Vita. More intervened by subtraction and emphasis, however: he divided the continuous prose of his source into short chapters and in­ven­ted titles for them that sometimes match the usual picture of Pico: Of his setting forth to scole and study in humanite Of his study in philosophie and divinite Of his lernying universally.35

But other titles show that More saw his Lyfe as a guide to abasing the flesh in order to exalt the spirit: Of his mynde and vaingloriouse dispitions at Rome Of the chaunge of his life The burning of his wanton bokis

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Of ye sale of his lordeshippes and almesse Of ye voluntari affliction and paining of his own body Of the dispising of worldly glorie.36

When he omitted parts of Gianfrancesco’s account, he skipped details that might blur his portrait of a secular saint. The biggest cut eliminates a long account of Pico’s works with descriptions of their unusual contents. More found some of this unsuited for a devotional Lyfe to be read by a nun. He also left out almost all of the “roughly fifty letters” that Gianfrancesco mentions. How would it help in the convent, for example, to revisit the epistolary friendship between Pico and Marsilio Ficino? Having only pieces of Gianfrancesco’s Vita, the nun would not learn that Pico had prepared a study of Platonism and the ancient theology in Italian. Nor would she read about his work on Latin, Greek, and Hebrew versions of scripture or his defense of Jerome’s Vulgate and the Septuagint Psalms. The philosophical innovations of the Conclusions would also be unknown to her, along with two of Pico’s best-­k nown works, both praised by Gianfrancesco. He admired the Heptaplus as “filled not only with the deepest mysteries of our Christian theology but also with lofty teachings by phi­los­o­ phers,” while conceding that it made “hard reading.” Likewise full of profound philosophy, in his nephew’s opinion, was Pico’s “­little study On Being and the One,” which also showed how to “correct one’s be­hav­ior.”37 Nonetheless, the prince’s ­great learning—an occasion of sin, a source of pride—­was a p rob­lem for the biographer. Perhaps this was why More dropped Gianfrancesco’s long description of the ambitious proj­ect that Pico’s death cut short, even though it was a defense of orthodoxy. ­After his conversion, Pico had “directed his thoughts to defeating seven enemies of the Church,” classified by Gianfrancesco as infidels, idolaters, Judaizers, and Muslims as well as Christians who disobeyed the Church or defiled religion with superstition or “have faith but no works.” Where o ­ thers had seen fewer than a hundred heresies, Pico detected twice as many. He was especially severe with Jews and astrologers, and Gianfrancesco published the huge polemic against astrology that his u ­ ncle came close to finishing—­ the only survival of his im­mense, seven-­part design.38 ­Earlier in his narrative, Gianfrancesco also recalled that Pico’s youthful studies included investigations of “Kabbalah, a secret tradition of Hebrew doctrines, . . . ​and many items as well about natu­ral magic which, as he explained it, is quite unlike the irreligious and criminal kind.” Even this



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brief notice—­the only explicit appearance of magic and Kabbalah in Gianfrancesco’s Vita—­was too much for More to show to a nun. No doubt he saw such aberrations as scandalous for any Christian, not to speak of his Lyfe’s saintly hero.39 From our perspective t­ oday, the absence in More’s Lyfe of any trace of Pico’s occultism, like its scant presence in Gianfrancesco’s Vita, is surprising. Still more startling is the silence of both biographies about Pico’s views on dignitas. Gianfrancesco used the word five times, but only to mean ‘rank’ or ‘title.’ In passing, both he and More mentioned the prince’s passion for liberty (libertas), connecting it with his character and his philosophical vocation and using it to account for his restlessness—in the geo­ graph­i­cal sense. Also, while calling phi­los­o­phers otherworldly, More injects the word “liberte” into a letter that says nothing about libertas, but he drops propria dignitas from a d if­fer­ent letter that uses this phrase to describe heaven as mankind’s proper home. And when he expands the words hominis dignitas et natura from Pico’s grim list of twelve spiritual weapons, he is also thinking of rank, while highlighting ­human dependence on God, treating the ­human condition as painful and giving no credit to h ­ uman choice. This constricted dignitas is the only kind in More’s anthology.40 ­There is no other dignity in Gianfrancesco’s Vita, which describes the Apology, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, and the unfinished defense against the Church’s enemies at some length but says almost nothing about the Oration, dismissing it as merely clever and eloquent. Elsewhere, while introducing the minor works, what Gianfrancesco noticed in the speech was literary and hermeneutic skill, used “to show how the poetic theology of ancient sages was handmaid to the mysteries of our theology.” Even so, it worried him to publish a text that linked his u ­ ncle’s name—­and his own—­ with ideas that a pope had denounced. He apologized for the part of the speech that the Apology repeats in his collection. But the opening of the Oration, on which Pico’s fame now rests, e­ ither made a bad impression on him or none at all.41 ­Whether they disliked the speech or simply thought it unimportant, one of t­ hese two reporters on Pico’s life has nothing to say about it, and the other barely mentions it. Moreover, More’s Lyfe avoids the magic and Kabbalah advertised by the Oration, and Gianfrancesco’s Vita gives only a few words to ­these now-­celebrated topics. A ­ fter writing the Latin word Cabala a single time, Gianfrancesco never mentioned it again, neither to summarize the

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Heptaplus nor to praise his u ­ ncle’s Hebrew learning. But he boasted that Pico “engaged the Jews mightily with statements from the Old Testament and with their own stipulations from Jewish scholarship.” He also told how this zealot for the faith routed the astrologers and debunked their predictions.42 ­Today, if a reader who knew the Oration or Conclusions also had Gianfrancesco’s Vita, she might ask how Pico had moved so far and so fast from promoting pagan and Jewish superstitions. But Gianfrancesco raised no such question in his biography. Neither his ­uncle’s disquieting magic nor the ennobling dignity of man nor the tension between them is vis­i­ble in this testament of ­family piety or in its En­glish version by Saint Thomas More.

4. ​Ficino’s Letters More chose three learned letters by Pico—­two addressed to Gianfrancesco—to pre­sent to a nun along with Giovanni’s prayer, devotional notes, and saintly biography. Pico sent all four of his messages to his nephew—­ those that ­were printed, anyhow—in 1492, the year when Innocent VIII died, Alexander VI was elected, and chances w ­ ere improving that the Church might forget the prince’s youthful m ­ istakes. Prudence might have put him on his best Christian be­hav­ior in that year. But ­there was more to his piety than that. His former life surely called for penance. He was already living like a monk by 1489, and by 1490 he was working to bring Savonarola back to Florence. In 1492 he met with the friar’s Dominican brethren in Ferrara.43 At the beginning and end of his correspondence as printed, we find the two longest letters to his nephew—­bookends of remorse placed without regard to chronology. In the order of the letters as published, Garin saw no order at all, only chaos. And since t­ here is no chronology, the only alternatives are, indeed, e­ ither chaos or some unstated pattern. The author of this order or disorder also wrote the biography that introduces the volume in which the letters w ­ ere printed, and their sequence reflects the structure of the biography—­the story of a p rodigy’s wayward life, conversion, and death.44 Accordingly, my reading of Pico’s published correspondence mirrors the tendentious Life written by his nephew and editor. Yet this Life seems no more partisan than many accounts of Pico’s thought—­especially his Oration—­written since the Enlightenment. In this l­ater lit­er­a­ture the axes



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to be ground have been eclectic and rationalist, liberal and romantic, Kantian and Hegelian, proto-­Fascist and post-­existentialist, rather than piagnone, and time has not yet blunted them all.45 Other letters published by Ficino in his own lifetime make it pos­si­ble to compare the Pico in them to the one exhibited in his nephew’s collection. Ficino wrote most of his letters to Pico or about him—­about 60 percent—­ after 1486 but before 1490. The letters from t­ hese three years are ­earlier than Pico’s penitent messages to his nephew and ­later than the annus mirabilis of 1486, the year of the Commento, Oration and Conclusions. Most of Ficino’s interest in Pico—at least the publicized part—­came in the wake of his impulsive actions in that year, the bad judgment that let him choose Rome as just the spot to test outrageous theological novelties. For all his prodigious brilliance, the prince rated only four letters from the g­ reat Platonist before 1487, by which time he was in desperate trou­ble. Ficino worked hard to rescue him, as the more frequent letters from this period show, but ­after 1489 Ficino’s epistolary attention waned.46 He wrote the letters for book 7 of his correspondence between 1481 and 1483, when Pico was in his late teens. The bright young man appears only once—as an Aristotelian turning wisely t­ oward Plato. In book 8, covering the period between 1484 and 1488, Pico’s star rises: 15 out of 76 letters address or mention him.47 At first he was more a pest than a prodigy, begging for books that Ficino ­couldn’t lend and returning other volumes late. Even when glory came from two triumphs of the mid-1480s, an essay on poetry sent to Lorenzo and a defense of philosophical language addressed to Ermolao Barbaro, Ficino’s correspondence failed to reflect the prince’s rising sun. Nor did it echo any rumbling about him for baiting Ficino in drafts of the Commento. Marsilio attended debates with learned Jews in Giovanni’s ­house and praised him for defending Chris­tian­ity against their assaults—in an undated letter, prob­ ably from 1486. Not u ­ ntil early in the next year, however, a­ fter he had seen results of t­ hose conversations in the 900 Conclusions, did Ficino’s letters react to any of Pico’s published writings. In the Conclusions he then found proof of Plato’s theory of learning as recovered memory—­what better explanation for so much information stored up in one so young?48 Before the next summer, Pico’s trou­bles ­were public. Ficino thought about the new scandal, examined the defense off ered by his friend’s Apology, conveyed it to Lorenzo, and relayed assurances of the Magnifico’s support. The next letter—­t ypical of many astrological consultations in Ficino’s

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correspondence—­finds the cause of Pico’s misery in the stars and looks to the heavens for relief. A series of letters in 1488 sustains the astrological conceit: when Ficino misses a promised visit, the culprit is a r etrograde Saturn. In a m ore serious tone, he lets Pico know that Lorenzo—­who talked with them both about astrological poetics—­singled him out for praise as someone destined for ­great ­things yet beset by ­great dangers. Perhaps the threats ­were demonic. Troops of a warlike Mars might overwhelm Saturnian spirits of Platonism. Ficino concluded that Pico, the Count of Concordia, was a true Prince of Concord whose harmonious Graces could defeat hostile Furies.49 Ficino sent ­these supportive letters to Pico in his darkest hour but kept some advice out of print. He knew that before the prince risked his life in Rome, he had already hurt his good name by abducting a married ­woman. Armed men fought and p ­ eople died, but Ficino’s remarks about the incident are frivolous and a l­ ittle blasphemous. Margherita, the pearl of Pico’s aff ections, was a n ymph, whom only a de migod like the prince could deserve, not her merely mortal husband. ­After all, the Gospel tells us to seek a pearl (margarita) of g­ reat price.50 Ficino had the good sense to stop the bantering, and l­ater messages in book 9 are more serene: walking the hills of Fiesole, talking about Neoplatonism, and looking for philosophical concord, while consulting the stars for his own three books On Life and admiring Pico’s Heptaplus for rev­er­ ent­ly recreating the creation. For the prince’s skill in philosophy, Marsilio had nothing but praise in letters to other correspondents.51 But in the next book, the tenth, three letters barely mention Pico, and in the eleventh only two—­both addressed to him—­have much to say. Heeding the Gospel, the prince has become a fisher of men, able to net big fish if he can rebut Averroes and Epicurus—­provided he has the good sense to ­handle the inevitable criticism. What Ficino does not criticize, praise, or even mention is the tract On Being and the One, which he found both wrong and impertinent. While at work on a Parmenides commentary meant to correct the young man’s ­mistakes, the se­nior phi­los­o­pher was also writing a twelfth and final book of letters, covering 1493 and 1494. It contains no messages to Pico, and only two mention him.52 At the end of book 11, thinking of a happier time, Ficino placed a letter to Paul of Middelburg, rhapsodizing about the golden age that we call the Florentine Re­nais­sance. But ­after Lorenzo de’ M edici died and his son Piero ruled feebly in Florence, while Savonarola ranted and the French



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invaded, the mood of the letters in book 12 turned grim. In 1493 Ficino sent thanks to Pico, Poliziano, and Cristoforo Landino for protecting him against attacks on his astrological medicine. But in the summer of 1494 the prince was preparing his own assault on astrology, and Marsilio wrote preemptively to Poliziano—to reassure the poet, and himself, that Pico’s intentions w ­ ere good. No published letter rec­ords the prince’s death in November of that year—­nor Poliziano’s, a few weeks e­ arlier. A politic message to the invader, Charles VIII, and another, a month ­after Pico died, mourn the fate of Florence and weakly concede Savonarola’s foresight.53 Ficino had more to say about Pico, however, and about his nephew as well. In the 1496 edition of Giovanni’s works, set between the “Prayer to God” and “Twelve Rules to Lead P ­ eople in Spiritual Combat”—­both translated by More—­Gianfrancesco placed “vari­ous testimonies” of his u ­ ncle’s “life, teaching and writings.” He added t­ hese two dozen pieces to the forty-­ seven letters, collecting them from messages and parts of messages sent to his u ­ ncle, to himself, and between ­others. The last two testimonia are by Ficino.54 The first is a letter to Germain de Ganay, a French scholar, politician, and ecclesiastic; it was written on March 23, 1495, too late for inclusion in Ficino’s published epistolary. “Last November, on the day when g­ reat King Charles of France entered our city of Florence,” Ficino recalled, our Mirandola left us, afflicting the learned with grief nearly as g­ reat as the joy that the King meanwhile provided. It was with joy, then, that the guardian spirit of the place repaid the learned for their lament and, to replace a p hilosophical presence that had been extinguished, in the meantime he lit a royal light, lest Florence seem the darker on that day when, as I say, the light from Mirandola was put out on earth and went back to heaven. For Pico left this shadow of a life happily, with this assurance: that he clearly seemed to be returning from a kind of exile to his fatherland in heaven. You also want to know what Pico had written already or what he was writing then. He wrote a Hexameron, an Apology and a work On Being and the One as well as some letters. When still young and passionate, he wrote something about love, but he condemned it when his judgment ripened, and he wanted it completely eff aced: it cannot be published without damage to him. For my part, I k now what this pious man wanted in the end, for Pico was a son to me in age, a b ­ rother in kinship

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and in love ­really another self. ­Every day he would ­labor at three ­t hings—­concord between Aristotle and Plato, commentaries on sacred scripture and refutations of the astrologers—­a ll of them argued out with eloquence and finesse, indeed, but in a style so gorgeous and drafted in such strange and obscure handwriting that he could scarcely read them. He never finished them himself, then, nor did he edit them, and no one ­else without the gift of divination can copy them out. Indeed, if that could be done, we would not still be longing for our Pico, as if he w ­ ere absent, nor would we any longer imagine that his light had been put out. But Gianfrancesco, his loyal nephew and a writer of ­great talent, works daily at publishing t­ hese works and describing his u ­ ncle’s life and deeds.

The Pico remembered h ­ ere was not the author of the Oration or the Conclusions. But he had written the Commento—­quicquid de amore—­which in Ficino’s view could only damage his friend’s memory if it ­were published. Was Gianfrancesco meant to see this advice? As for the prince’s ­later writings, what Ficino thought is clear: he found them “indeed dark” and hopelessly illegible, a ­great challenge to Pico’s editor and “loyal nephew.” Seven months ­later, on November  1, 1495, Ficino wrote to Gianfrancesco, mentioning the ­earlier letter “on Pico’s passing and in praise of him.” Perhaps he also included that letter—in order to convey his verdict on the Commento. In any case, knowing that Gianfrancesco was about to publish his ­uncle’s writings, Ficino reminded him of “extensive and singular praises of Pico throughout many works that I wrote some time ago.” He also directed Gianfrancesco to “my books of letters, especially the ­later ones: twelve have just been published, in fact.” The main burden of this short message (or piece of a longer one) is conventional praise for his departed friend. “On t­ hese and other such ­things,” says Ficino, “you yourself have written better and more in your Life of Pico, not so much to shed light on him—­for who would add light to the sun?—as to clear up works by him that are indeed dark, though most deserving of light, by driving clouds away from them.”55 Had Ficino actually read the piagnone biography? Prob­ably he had, or ­else he was willing to g­ amble a public judgment on what­ever Gianfranceso would produce. At the time when he wrote to Ganay, he could have been in touch with his friend’s nephew and watching or even consulting on his editorial work: the order of Pico’s writings as he lists them for his French correspondent is the same as the order of the 1496 edition. Moreover, since



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the Life of Pico calls the unpublished works a “ tangled mess,” and since Ficino saw sorting it out as the main value of the Life, it seems likely that he had read it, finding in it, perhaps, the Pico known to him from the years just before the French invasion, before he “went happy from this shadow of a life.” Speaking of the Life, Ficino assured Gianfrancesco that “mortal men ­will speak wondrous praises of your ­great fidelity to your ­uncle, which God w ­ ill judge worthy of no small rewards.”56

5. ​Savonarola Just as Ficino selected some letters but not o ­ thers for his epistolary, Gianfrancesco made choices on his ­uncle’s behalf and his own—­not to reprint the Conclusions, for example. The nephew was also Savonarola’s biographer: he wrote the first of his several defenses of the friar in 1496, the year when he published his ­uncle’s works and Savonarola was at the peak of his power. Events had confirmed his apocalyptic gospel: the scourge of God had come down at last with an army from France, bringing in tribulation to begin the long-­promised renewal of the Church; only the penitent would be saved.57 Giovanni Pico answered the friar’s call—­remembering his Roman debacle, no doubt, and prepared by long acquaintance with Savonarola to expect harsh prophecies. He had once debated him about the place of pagan sages in Christian belief, smiling as the friar railed at Plato and Aristotle. But by the time Pico died in 1494, as Gianfrancesco told the story, his penitential mood was also visionary, as if Savonarola ­were writing his deathbed lines.58 In Gianfrancesco’s Vita, his u ­ ncle meets death gazing at the cross, armed by the sacraments, confessing the creed, and caught up by visions of heaven and the Virgin. When a kindly relative tells him that his pains ­will soon end, he answers that what consoles him is that his sinning—­not his suff ering—­will cease. Gianfrancesco reached Florence too late to witness ­these final scenes, but he reported what ­others told him. He also described what he heard in person—­Savonarola’s preaching about the dead phi­los­o­ pher, whom the friar chastised for not heeding his vocation.59 “For two years, then, I t hreatened him with the lash,” Savonarola explained, ­because “he neglected to follow through on the task that God had . . . ​assigned to him. Again and again I asked God to cut him down a bit, I admit it, . . . ​but I did not seek what killed him.” In the end, Providence

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decreed that the ungrateful prince should die with both his biggest jobs undone: no finished body of intellectual work equal to his gifts; and no spiritual commitment consonant with the divine plan. Although laxity cost him “part of the shining crown waiting for him in heaven,” prayer, almsgiving, and contrition allowed him to escape hell’s eternal flames and burn in the transient fires of purgatory. Savonarola’s grotesque eulogy ended on a point of practical spirituality, asking Pico’s friends to pray for his relief from torment.60 ­A fter the sermon, someone told the friar that he too had seen Pico in a vision: “the dead man appeared to him walled in by fire and confessing that he was still paying the price of his ingratitude.” Gianfrancesco added this anonymous report on his ­u ncle’s agony to the last part of the Life, whose burden is to salvage three claims from denials by cynics: that even the saved may suff er in purgatory; that his ­u ncle’s deathbed visions ­were real and true; and that Savonarola’s prophecies ­were just as accurate.61 That Pico himself trusted the friar is likely. His friends showed the way. Girolamo Benivieni, who became an apologist for Savonarola, was g­ oing with Pico to hear his sermons by 1490. Poliziano spent the last weeks of his life cloistered in San Marco, where the friar ruled and preached. Roberto Salviati, another friend of Pico and Ficino, went faster and farther, taking the Dominican habit in 1492. In the winter ­after Ficino lost Poliziano and Pico, as French troops marched through his city, even he conceded that “God often inspires prophets to preach to us our coming woes.” But four years ­later he recanted his faith in Savonarola. Meanwhile, Giovanni Nesi, who had been a follower of Ficino since the 1480s, wrote his Oracle of the New Age, an apocalyptic dream treatise addressed to Gianfrancesco and meant to adapt the Platonic ancient theology to the friar’s style of prophecy. Savonarola is the central figure in Nesi’s dream, where the dead Pico also appears to interpret the preacher’s oracles and deliver his millenarian message to Gianfrancesco.62 In 1496, as Nesi proclaimed a New Age, Gianfrancesco worked to defend its prophet while also publishing his u ­ ncle’s works, prefaced by the Life and including the letters. The Life says that before he died, Pico had spent two years ­under Savonarola’s unrelenting lash, which puts the beginning of this last and penitential part of his life in 1492, the year of the four published letters to his nephew—­a lso the year of the last letter that Ficino sent him. Just as the Life is the story of Pico’s fall, repentance, and godly death,



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so is penitence the central theme of the letters that Gianfrancesco published along with the Life.63

6. ​First Letters from Pico ­ ecause Ficino presented his letters in chronological order, they can be B read as the armature of a history. But ­there is no chronology in Pico’s letters, even though their editor was aware that his u ­ ncle changed over time, writing some letters “when he was young and [­others] when he was older, . . . ​­after he had given his ­whole heart to God.” The conscious neglect of chronology suggests that Gianfrancesco wanted the letters to be read not historically but thematically and spiritually. The crucial issue is Pico’s repentance: its proclamation in a first group of letters; its failure in a second group; and its fulfillment in a third. The markers of ­these three groups are the four letters that Pico wrote to his nephew in 1492. We cannot know exactly what Gianfrancesco saw in ­every line of each of his ­uncle’s letters, so ­these bound­aries can only be approximate, which makes my reading of the letters not only tendentious but indistinct.64 Crystal clear, however, is the point made by the first and last letters, which show the soul at first harried by the world, the flesh, and the Devil and then saved by being crucified to the world. The first ten or so letters, beginning and ending with messages to Gianfrancesco, sustain the initial proclamation of repentance, just as the last ten or so, marked in the same way, recover it—­after redemption slips away from more than twice as many letters in between.65 Although life loads us down with “misery, anxiety, and worry,” trou­bles and temptations are a comfort if they lead to spiritual victory. But if we forget where victory lies and follow ­people who care for worldly plea­sure, we ignore “our own standing (dignitas), our heavenly f­ ather and fatherland, willingly enslaving ourselves to such p ­ eople even though we are born ­free.” Ours should be a “holy sort of ambition” rooted in the Gospel and nourished by the blood of martyrs. This is Pico’s advice in the first letter of his collection. The third and fourth are the famous letters to Lorenzo and Ermolao Barbaro, which are essays on poetry and philosophical language. Gianfrancesco, like Ficino, surely did not publish e­ very letter available to him. He made choices, but t­ hese two letters w ­ ere already too famous to be omitted: their content is well known, and I w ­ ill ignore it to focus on larger patterns in the epistolary.66

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The ninth letter, a b rief note of apology for not writing, can also be ignored. But in the rest of the letters of the first group, Gianfrancesco had the makings of a declaration of spiritual hope, a kerygma of penitence. The second letter, following the denunciation of the world in the first, conveys letters 3 a nd 4 t o Filippo Beroaldo and thereby frames t­ hose letters. Although letter 2 confirms Pico’s liking for poets—­even Catullus—it also reminds us that he “gave only scattered attention to lit­er­a­ture in his spare time, applying his . . . ​serious eff orts to philosophy.” Lit­er­a­ture also comes up in the fifth letter, addressed to a poet, Battista Spagnoli. But the Mantuan poet was a religious writer and a cloistered Carmelite. Pico told him that he spent his mornings on philosophy and divided his nights “between sleep and holy scripture,” leaving the after­noon for recreation, “sometimes poetry and prose and any other light work.” 67 This Pico is more serious about philosophy than poetry. But the sixth letter, to Aldo Manuzio, founder of the famous press in Venice, warns that even philosophy must not “divert us from the true mysteries. Philosophy seeks the truth, theology discovers it, religion possesses it”—­a pious ascent reflected in the seventh letter, to Barbaro, identified not as an eminent scholar but as “an excellent shepherd of men, a soldier of enormous energy for the w ­ hole Church.” Pico congratulates him on his controversial appointment as patriarch of Aquileia, noting that “­there are just three ways to live: the civic life, the contemplative, and the religious, the first requiring prudence, the second learning; and the third—at the summit of life as a whole—­requires holiness in addition to t­ hese other two.” The next letter to Barbaro, number 8, is a chatty, conventional message of friendship, with a list of virtues—­“prudence, good conduct, learning and humanity”—­that have been framed by the piety of letter 7. Having become a blessed bishop, Barbaro has also acquired the higher grace of holiness, better than a scholar’s learning or a citizen’s prudence.68 For Gianfrancesco, his ­uncle’s failure to choose the religious life—­ embraced by Barbaro, another g­ reat scholar—­was the crux of his spiritual journey, which gives force to the introduction of this theme in letter 7. The brief tenth letter from Pico to his nephew is an ordinary scholar’s complaint, hoping that civic duty ­w ill not take him away from his studies and books. When the books are Hebrew, the studies are sanctified, and letter 7 has already made learning holy as a step ­toward the religious life.69



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7. ​More Letters from Pico At this point in Pico’s epistolary, a­ fter letter 10 to Gianfrancesco and seen from his piagnone perspective, the rot sets in. The next two letters are to Ficino and Poliziano, opening the part of the collection where repentance fails. Pico wants to borrow Iamblichus from Ficino, and he praises Poliziano’s Epictetus, calling it his introduction to Stoicism. Steadfast in their pursuit of virtue, the Stoics w ­ ere also pagan materialists, and Iamblichus was an idolatrous wizard. By making such texts available and attractive to Pico, Ficino pushed him down the path to the scandals of 1486: from Gianfrancesco’s point of view, this is a plausible response to Ficino’s influence on his ­uncle, whose epistolary confirms it by omitting so many of Marsilio’s letters. Just where Pico’s presence peaks in Ficino’s letters, ­after 1486, ­there are no letters at all for two years in the collection published by Gianfrancesco. Since Ficino’s correspondence had already been published in early 1495, and since Ficino notified Gianfrancesco of its publication, it is likelier that Gianfrancesco withheld letters from Ficino than that he did not have them by 1496. The Pico letters in Ficino’s collection from the period in question rec­ord a warm and supportive relationship between the two phi­los­o­phers. But the piagnone nephew may have found their recorded be­hav­ior off ensive— or incriminating.70 As for Poliziano, he was no paragon of good conduct, literary or other­ wise, but Pico was taken with him as the very model of a scholar-­poet, a vocation of which the prince himself was only half capable. The central part of the epistolary shows him entranced by worldly lit­er­a­ture and straying from contrition. Gianfrancesco must have winced at some of Giovanni’s remarks about comedy: “it takes a sharper wit to write plays and jokes, provided this is done learnedly and elegantly, . . . ​than to deal stylishly with more serious topics”; also at an obsequious message to Poliziano whose worship of the muses Pico wants to emulate “in order to do oratory for phi­los­o­phers.” The prince also thanks Paolo Cortesi for a letter “full of eloquence, full of style, full of love and kindness. . . . ​It ­will be easy to get permission from my philosophy, then, to read your letters frequently and willingly, including the parts that praise me.”71 “Good Lord, what learning! What rich expression! What brilliance! What elegant speech!” This eff usion, this delight with Barbaro’s “Roman Themistius,” is not philosophical austerity in search of truth, and truth is

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not the charm, elegance, erudition, and sweetness that Pico praises in his correspondents. Eloquence made them famous, however, and fame is not such a bad t­ hing—is it? Pico finds “splendid eloquence” in the poetry of Battista Spagnoli; the poems are sacred, but Pico’s reaction is Petrarchan, profane and faintly suggestive: he “withdraws into them as if they are a garden. The plea­sure rising in my heart is always so g­ reat that my heart wants nothing but to be worn out again in order to be refreshed again.”72 Pico’s eventual turn from poetry to philosophy was a step in the right direction, but phi­los­o­phers named in the correspondence should have worried Gianfrancesco. Philoponus was a Christian critic of Neoplatonism but also a Monophysite heretic. Themistius had dubious views on the soul. Apuleius, Apollonius, and Iamblichus ­were notorious sorcerers. Pico also borrowed a book on fortune-­telling, and then ­there was the Latin Koran that Ficino loaned him.73 When Ficino asked him to return it, what Pico sent instead was a euphoric account of his exploits in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic: Very soon I expect to hear Mohammed himself speaking to me in his native tongue . . . ​and I h ave no worries about making less pro­gress in . . . ​Arabic and Chaldean . . . ​t han in Hebrew, where, to be sure, my skill in letter-­w riting is not yet A+, though it is faultless. See what an energetic mind can do! . . . ​That certain books in both languages have reached my hands is clearly no accident or coincidence, but God’s ­w ill and power supporting my studies. . . . ​But to get back to your letter, your Mohammed is in Perugia. . . . ​If ­you’ve been complaining about me . . . ​, ­you’re simply being unfair. . . . ​I’m a Pythagorean, and we hold nothing more sacred than friendship.74

The letter is full of the arrogance that runs through this part of the correspondence. Planning his Roman escapade, for example, Pico assured a correspondent that the Almighty was his guarantee that g­ reat ­things would come of it; only his own mortal weakness could spoil t­ hings. Sometimes he was less sure of his standing with the Deity, however, and he was especially anxious about his poetry, but it took the shock of public failure to turn insecurity into humility. Meanwhile, the self-­criticism in ­these central letters, when it is not fawning or merely conventional, is pouty and adolescent. “Every­thing of mine is ordinary, boring, silly and vulgar,” he whines to Tommaso Medio, b ­ ecause he can write nothing more “edgy, elegant and pointed” than his own dull stuff .75



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Flippancy, frivolity, self-­regard, superficiality, and unorthodoxy are con­spic­u­ous in the central group of letters, blemishes big enough for Gianfrancesco to spot as detours from the path of penitence. Pico aims for the straight and narrow, but he ­can’t quite make it. Thanking Battista Spagnoli, the Carmelite poet, for urging him to purge his soul, he names Poliziano, a s ecular poet and Medici propagandist, as guarantor of his good intentions. He assures Battista that his aims are an “honest life, good be­hav­ior and godly religion.” Yet “­there are many routes to learning,” he adds, “and what­ever lit­er­a­ture can do for us, it gives the skin some tint and makes us more attractive by putting color in the face.”76

8. ​Last Letters from Pico Letter 36 to Andrea Corneo is a turning point in Gianfrancesco’s collection, as Thomas More recognized when he selected it for his gloomy anthology, though it does not rec­ord the full conversion that—as Gianfrancesco told the story—­saved his ­uncle ­after the Roman disaster and b ­ ecause of it. Written in 1486, following the stupidity with Margherita but before Pico went to Rome, the letter to Corneo distances the writer from the world by rejecting the active life of a prince. This refusal was prideful, however: Pico called himself a p hi­los­o­pher, and phi­los­o­phers are kings of kings, not mere princes. His critics should therefore forget the dalliance with Margherita: David, Solomon, Aristotle, Jerome, and other heroes had prob­lems with ­women too. No longer writing love verses, he ­will soon leave for Rome and send news about his triumphs ­there. From Gianfrancesco’s perspective, ­these ­great expectations ­were delusions. From the period of their aftermath—­the two years a­ fter 1486 when Ficino wrote so many letters of support—he found nothing fit to print.77 The next letter that Gianfrancesco chose is remarkable. His u ­ ncle, only six years older and single, writes to him as a marriage counselor—­despite his own rocky love life. The slightly elder Pico exhorts his nephew, married less than two years, to regard his bride as someone to whom you owe your body in the way that you owe your soul itself to God. Given the state of her body and her age, what she wants . . . ​you must to some extent . . . ​satisfy as she desires. . . . ​In the end, you c­ an’t be wholly your own person once y­ ou’ve chosen to submit yourself to a wife . . . ​, and yet you can be wholly God’s. . . . ​Work hard at sacred

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scripture, especially reading the Gospel, which leads the soul to God . . . ​ while day and night the world and the Devil keep leading it away.

Pico seems to realize that sexual obligation is mutual, yet he sees sex as a religious duty, not a h ­ uman plea­sure. Like the letter to Gianfrancesco that opens the first part of the epistolary, this one introduces the third redemptive part by putting the flesh where it belongs—­with the world and the Dev­il.78 The next letter—­the third in the collection to make letter-­writing itself a topic—­diff ers from ­earlier messages by putting prudence, seriousness, and sobriety above elegance and eloquence. Prudence also motivates other letters in this final section: in one of them Pico regrets that bad p oetry damaged his good name as he tried to become a phi­los­o­pher; in another he fi­nally seems more ­humble than insecure, warning a correspondent that the ­things his friends say about him “are neither very ­great or very many, and the value they put on me has more to do with desire than judgment.” He advises a friend to ignore his vernacular poems; he dismisses the Commento as something done to relax; and he puts profane poetry away to take up the Psalms. The Heptaplus shows that his Hebrew learning is godly, and he w ­ ill study the ­whole Bible in the same devout way.79 The final letters that Gianfrancesco selected rescue his u ­ ncle’s ­later proj­ ects from the disgrace that spoiled the works of 1486. Even Kabbalah is redeemed by a long discussion of the Hebrew alphabet that confirms Pico’s support for Jerome against the Jews. The bigotry was expected and the topic is technical, though it may have made Gianfrancesco uneasy. The 900 Conclusions—­not included by him in the 1496 Opera and repudiated in the Life—­are full of extravagant Christian Kabbalah. Gianfrancesco published his ­uncle’s longer and unfinished attack on the astrologers, however, perhaps seeing it as Savonarolan polemic—­yet another reason to ignore the astrological letters that Ficino sent to Pico a­ fter 1486.80 The last letter in the nephew’s collection, to him from his ­uncle, mirrors the first: just as temptation is a blessing in disguise, so is slander from the unrigh­teous a s ecret sign of righ­teousness. Pico’s parting advice echoes Paul’s words about “Christ crucified, a s candal to the Jews, folly to the gentiles, but to us power and wisdom.” Pico agrees that the better choice is to be crucified by the world and exalted by God . . . ​ for the world crucifies us to life, whereas God exalts us to glory. . . . ​The dead are ­t hose who ­don’t live in God and, in this interlude of death



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wrapped up in time, they make e­ very eff ort to achieve an eternal death. . . . ​Make sure ­you’re always thinking about the press of death, . . . ​ how false t­ hose pleasures are that embrace us in order to choke us, what frauds t­ hose honors are that lift us high to cast us down. . . . ​Farewell, and love God, whom you started to fear some time ago.

The Giovanni Pico that Gianfrancesco pre­sents to the world wins a penitential crown by crucifying himself to that world of the flesh.81 Ficino—­friendly with both Picos but not with Savonarola—­called Gianfrancesco his u ­ ncle’s “loyal nephew” and predicted that his Life would win ­human praise and a divine reward. To make the Life credible, however, the nephew had chosen his memories carefully and gave them a pattern. He not only manipulated his ­uncle’s papers, he also treated the Oration as an embarrassing piece of juvenilia; he omitted the already published Conclusions, loaded with magic and Kabbalah, from the printed works; but he promised to publish an unfinished attack on astrology.82 Gianfrancesco’s choices raise questions: Which Pico, or whose Pico, was he presenting? The Pico of his 1496 collection is no herald of ­human freedom and dignity, no hero of progressive, world-­affirming, self-­ fashioning humanism, no Hermetic freedom fighter ready to master the world with magic and put it on a path to modern science. Gianfrancesco hallowed his u ­ ncle as a w orld-­denying Christian saint—­holy enough to edify Thomas More. This was not the endangered but engaged intellectual counseled by Ficino’s letters. And yet Ficino, More, and Gianfrancesco w ­ ere all right about Pico in their dif­fer­ent ways: he wrote works of astounding originality that are compatible with Ficino’s admiration for his intellect, with his nephew’s shrine to his character and even with Saint Thomas More’s selective story of his pious life and works. The Pico of 1486 (the Commento, Oration, Conclusions, and Ficino’s astrological correspondence) is also the Pico of 1492–1494 (the penitential writings and Disputations), ­after failure had chastened the older prince and made him ready for an apocalypse scripted by Savonarola. He needed only to add some years, put rash choices b ­ ehind him, and succumb to the friar’s puritanism—­like many of his contemporaries. When Gianfrancesco put Giovanni’s legacy in print, he had no need to manufacture a P ico of his own in order to tell a p ious story. No one knows w ­ hether he did more with his u ­ ncle’s writings than withhold some from publication and impose an order on what he sent to the printer. The

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penitential letters addressed to him w ­ ere stronger temptations to meddle than impersonal devotional items. But the letters, the spiritual rules, and the prayer translated by More have this in common with the Oration and Conclusions: they all deny the body to flee the world.83

9. ​Pico Boxes ­ ater pre­sen­ta­tions of Pico as Kantian or existentialist have done more L than tamper. What ­these distortions share with Gianfrancesco’s Life is an appealing story—­blazing genius snuff ed out too soon. The story made Pico famous for centuries and still keeps him in the textbooks, which put exuberant statements by him and about him in boxes: Pico Boxes. Delivered by the big, slick, disposable volumes that purvey the past to college students, Pico Boxes make for quick reading. They put the prince on display, highlighting his star quality, making him ubiquitous and con­spic­u­ous. Sometimes they come with pictures that link his deeds with a face—­a publicity scheme as old as the Nuremberg Chronicles and the Inscriptions of Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera.84 Giovio’s Inscriptions Set Beside True Images of Famous Men, first published in 1546, decorate capsule biographies with elegant type and engraved portraits. The learned bishop, never quite a c ardinal, r­ ose through the courts of Medici popes and their successors, who gave him an insider’s view of history. He promoted Giorgio Vasari’s ­career and helped him find backers for his Lives of the Artists. Supported by Cosimo I de’ Medici and given access to other princes and prelates, he also wrote an eyewitness History of His Own Time.85 The brief biographies in Giovio’s Inscriptions started as captions for a portrait gallery. Surrounding famous ­faces with gossipy prose, he gave his luminaries personality, inviting readers to gaze at the mighty, review their deeds, and feel vicarious intimacy. This is Giovio’s Pico Box, an early one:

Phoenix is the name they rightly gave to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola b ­ ecause the gods above endowed him with all the very rarest gifts of body and mind—­not to mention a noble f­ amily. With his amazing depth of talent and refinement, handsome appearance, elegant manners and incomparable eloquence in debating



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and writing, he quickly made admirers of all the learned of his time. In a w ork of ­great seriousness—­t hough it was never finished—he wrote against the astrologers, confuting all their worthless divination with energy and erudition, and he seems to have discouraged the professors of the subtle sciences from writing. But in the Heptaplus, when he discloses the mysteries of sacred scripture to us in godlike speech, and in the Apology, when this im­mensely serious man applies the methods of all the disciplines to defend propositions of his own devising chosen for debate, he seems to have surpassed himself in what his learning and memory achieved. He left this life deserving heaven, a young man of thirty-­ three, on the famous day that l­ ater brought such anguish to Italy, when Charles VIII, King of France, entered Florence. As an army paraded into the city u ­ nder the banners of a f oreign nation, the mourning for Pico was so ­great that not even this extraordinary spectacle nor the im­mense joy of liberty reclaimed could in any way overcome the grief.

This Phoenix is a rare bird with brilliant plumage. The portrait that goes with the hyperbole is homely (see Figure  15  in Chapter  9), yet the Box describes “gifts of body and mind” that led to honors all around. Pico squelched the astrologers, revealed the secrets of the sacred page, tested original ideas in disputation, and died young in the odor of sanctity—­ “deserving heaven,” just as Gianfrancesco expected. But his u ­ ncle in­ven­ted no magic, studied no Kabbalah, and never failed spectacularly to deliver an Oration—as far as one can see from Giovio’s elogium. On the day of his death (at thirty-­one, not thirty-­three), Florentines w ­ ere too sad to enjoy their restored liberty. Th ­ ere is neither freedom nor any dignity in this early Pico Box.86 Fifty years a­ fter Pico died, his fame was still fresh for this Italian ecclesiastic with Medici connections. Yet the bishop mentions only one of the achievements—­refuting astrology—­that would keep the prince’s memory alive. At the end of Giovio’s c­ entury, Johann Kepler would declare that his own discoveries “might correctly be seen as wholly in agreement with [Pico’s] views about the falsity of astrology”—­though the agreement was actually partial. Giovio calls attention to astrology and the Heptaplus but

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says nothing about Kabbalah, though Johann Reuchlin had already confirmed that no Christian before Pico could even put a name on it. And about ­human dignity, nothing at all—­let alone anything original—­could be credited to Pico. On that count, no celebrity like Reuchlin or Kepler came forward to trumpet the prince’s fame.87 Nonetheless, ­because of his life story, Pico’s name never faded: even flimsy accounts like Giovio’s kept feeding the narrative. Meanwhile, Eu­ro­ pe­ans ­were turning to new systems of information, in novel genres, to assist or extend or replace older ways of transmitting knowledge. The task of one such innovation was to digest, classify, and evaluate current and past expertise on miscellaneous subjects. Its creator was Georg Morhof, who died in 1691, three years ­a fter publishing the first volume of his Polyhistor. The material on both Picos that fills this box comes from an expanded edition of 1708: Giovanni Pico and Gianfrancesco Pico, Counts of Mirandola, made ­great names for themselves in their day by publishing books on philosophical and Kabbalist subjects—­especially Giovanni Pico, who produced g­ reat proofs of his genius when very young. Sometimes he Platonizes, to be sure, but mainly he draws on the philosophy of the Jews, as shown by vari­ous works of his that have a Kabbalist flavor. He wrote a very intelligent book Against the Astrologers, to which Lucio Bellanti—­not his intellectual equal—­responded. He died young at the age of 32, the time predicted by astrologers in vindication of their art. His Heptaplus, a c ommentary on the six days, deals with the establishment of the world, and much of it is Kabbalist.

Pico is still a prodigy and a scourge of astrologers. But now he is a Kabbalist too, not just a Platonizer and Judaizer, at a time when some of Morhof’s readers w ­ ere starting to disavow syncretism and call themselves ‘eclectics.’88 In the same period, other Christians ­were studying Kabbalah to enrich their own religion. Henry More—­a pious and learned theologian—­ published Kabbalist Conjectures in 1653 to support an original theosophy that also drew on Neoplatonic and Hermetic writings. But the theologian distanced himself from “religious frensie,” “headstrong melancholy” and



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“blinde enthusiasme.” L ­ ater, Kant too would denounce ‘enthusiasm’ and call it Schwärmerei, a delusion that o ­ thers would detect in Pico. Thomas Traherne—­a poet younger than Henry More who shared his feelings—­ sensed something similar when he wrote that Pico “permitteth his fancy to wander a ­little wantonly” even though “deep and serious ­things are secretly hidden u ­ nder his ­free and luxuriant language.” 89 Like Henry More and Thomas More, Traherne was exuberant in his own way about religion, and like Pico he died young—in 1674, a­ fter publishing only a ­little. His Centuries of Meditations, a devotional miscellany, was first printed in 1908, ­after the prince’s story had gone its own way and had taken many more turns. The spirituality in the Centuries is mystical, affirmative, and optimistic. “O Lord what creatures! What creatures ­shall we become! What divine, what illustrious Beings!” ­These raptures introduce what “Picus Mirandula admirably saith in his tract De dignitate hominis.” Then come se­lections from the start of the Oration, stopping just ­after God’s speech to Adam and reviewing the levels of sensuality, reason, intellect, and divinity through which ­humans may rise. “Thus Picus Mirandula spake in an Oration made before a m ost learned assembly,” concludes the poet. Traherne could have found a few ideas from the speech—­but not its author’s name—in con­temporary En­glish versions of Giovan Battista Gelli’s very popu­lar Circe, first published in Italian in 1549. Gelli never mentioned Pico in his Homeric animal fable on h ­ uman misery, while other promoters of dignidad and dignité showed no interest in the Oration. Pico’s revised creation story was a “­little fable,” said Traherne, and the author was not to be taken literally when he claimed that an omniscient God “filled all the world with creatures before he thought of man.” Also, “the changeable power he ascribeth to man is not to be referred to his body, . . . ​his rind or coat or skin. . . . ​The deformity or excellency is within.” Yet the poet’s Pico was not the ascetic of Thomas More’s Lyfe—­a lways struggling to escape a corrupted body.90 Other Meditations on the Six Days of Creation, sometimes attributed to Traherne, pre­sent a h exameral theology—­like Pico’s Heptaplus. “Similitudes” between God and man—­infinity, eternity, and so on—­make up a doxology that blesses God for mankind’s divine endowments: ­these praises may also echo the opening of the Oration. “How beautiful a creature Man is,” says the author, “the curious epitomy of all the creatures, the metropolis of all beings.” Just as Pico describes f­ ree choice as a gift from God, so

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t­ hese Meditations give thanks “for the ­great liberty and lordly dominion conceded.” But a similitude of omnipresence must be “purely spiritual, not gross, terrene or corporeal.”91 ­These additions—­and pos­si­ble additions—to the Anglophone tradition on Pico look past the gloom of More’s Lyfe and Gianfrancesco’s Vita: it was the prince’s mysticism, not his biography, that appealed to Traherne. But when the Six Days appeared in 1717, Susanna Hopton—­“a person of quality, . . . ​truly devout and pious”—­was the author named in the preface: not the poet. ­Today the Centuries and the other meditations get less attention than the poems, and even they ­were not read ­until 1903—­soon enough, however, for Traherne’s comments to make the fine print in l­ater accounts of Pico.92 In 1723, shortly ­after the Six Days appeared, Edward Jesup—­a client of the Dukes of Devonshire and Grafton—­published Lives of Picus and Pascal, drawing on More’s Lyfe. Jesup thought that Pico had lost his audience: the prince’s story was “like fire ­under the embers for two hundred years past.” To fan the flames, Jesup imitated ‘Dryden’s Plutarch,’ a collaborative Parallel Lives in En­glish. Comparative biography was suitable ­because Pascal and Pico—­these “greatest lights of their time”—­were both prodigies who sought solitude ­after a crisis, “equal in their aff ections for retirement.” They ­were ripe subjects for an ambitious writer. For Pico, Jesup had More’s Lyfe in En­glish; for Pascal, he had a more recent biography in French by Gilberte Pascal, the mathematician’s s­ ister.93 The parallel is close in Jesup’s telling, “as if the soul of Picus had informed the body of Pascal.” Similarities of birth, f­ amily, and early promise encouraged the same virtues—­charity, piety, purity, simplicity, and wisdom. Just as the shock of his Roman debacle drove Pico to mend his ways, so the force of conversion to Jansenism turned Pascal against the world and the flesh. Never healthy, he diagnosed his migraines, toothache, and stomach trou­ble as signs of spiritual vigor, living “by this maxim, . . . ​ that sickness and infirmity being the natu­ral state of Christians, . . . ​to count oneself happy in being sickly and infirm.” Illness is natu­ral; happiness is neurasthenic.94 Mortification and renunciation are Jesup’s themes for Pascal’s story, as sanctity and learning are keynotes of his Life of Pico. “In the mortification of his senses [Pascal] . . . ​would never refuse them anything that was grating, harsh, disrelishing or any ways displeasing.” The incredible intensity that focused his mathematical work also taught him algorithms of



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uncritical belief, and “he paid a blind obedience to all its dictates.” Although he never ceased “estranging himself from the world,” perfection in God’s law went hard on him—­t his monster of faith and calculation whose godliness also hurt the ­people closest to him. He talked about charity yet shunned ­human com­pany ­because visitors might endanger his soul, and he kept his own ­family outside the sanctuary of grace: “He had no worldly attachment to t­ hose whom he loved.” He warned Gilberte not to hug her own c­ hildren. When their ­sister Jacqueline died, Gilberte grieved, and “he r­ eally chid me severely for it,” she wrote, “to be troubled at the death of the just.”95 Although Jesup retold Gilberte’s story about her uncaring b ­ rother in some detail, for Pico he tried to avoid “the prolixity used in the days of Sir Thomas More.” But why match Gilberte’s livelier Life with an anodyne reduction of More’s material? Jesup’s aim was the same as More’s, to hold Pico up as a paragon of learned Christian spirituality. His theme is “piety and profound erudition,” legendary in this genius who “became an excellent humanist in his twelfth year.” Jesup may have been the first to call Pico a ‘humanist’ in English—­presumably not the same as a ‘phi­los­o­pher.’ What ­else did he have in mind? In corresponding sentences of More’s Lyfe, Jesup could find no humanists, only p ­ eople who studied languages and “shined in eloquence.” In any case, he put piety above learning of any kind, having no notion of a secular humanism.96 Jesup cut More’s Lyfe in half and updated the archaic diction. He also modernized the message. In one passage Pico has been coaxed to debate with Dominicans—­Savonarola’s brethren. Describing this event, both Gianfrancesco and More reported what this sadder, wiser genius had come to think about academic combat—­its best form (small, quiet, private) and worst consequences (vanity, hostility, cruelty). Both went on to summarize the prince’s polycephalous learning. ­Because they knew about the 900 Conclusions, they realized that their hero was not a credible critic of forensic vainglory. They sustained the pretense, however: at the time of the Dominican disputation, the Roman catastrophe was past, and Pico’s prideful days w ­ ere ­behind him.97 Jesup heightened the desired eff ect by condensing the episode. When he repeated Gianfrancesco’s account of what his u ­ ncle “used to say” about debate, the prince himself—­now contrite about oratory—­seemed to be admonishing the disputatious friars. “The quibbling he had observ’d in some of ’em was beneath the dignity of philosophy,” as Jesup told the story,

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and Pico “added that he found some of ’em very good humanists and no phi­los­o­phers; ­others acquainted with the philosophy of the ancients and altogether ignorant of the modern; and some that w ­ ere ­great humanists and well acquainted with the philosophy of the ancients and moderns, with their hearts swell’d with vanity and setting up for the idolls of the ignorant.” Quarreling sages and Bacon’s idols transposed the scene to the early Enlightenment. Thomas More could not have written about ‘humanists’ in this way. In the saint’s Lyfe of Pico, the sinners stuck in vainglory ­were indistinct, just “sume man”—­simply aliquis and alius in Gianfrancesco’s text. Where More sketched a contest of innovation against tradition, philology against philosophy, wit against learning, Jesup sharpened the conflict and transported it to his own ­century’s ­battles of ancients against moderns. Pico was the winner in this anachronistic report from the trenches.98 Jesup’s Life, like More’s, is a pious story of a young man squandering his gifts and recovering ­after a conversion. The turning point was the canceled Roman debate, a “piece of arrogance” yet a happy fault that “plac’d his vanity in its proper light, for he saw it and was asham’d.” Though Jesup claimed to omit no “material circumstance” in abridging More’s Lyfe, he told the story with less incident. He remembered that Alexander VI forgave Pico but forgot that Innocent VIII had condemned him. Savonarola’s part in the deathbed drama dis­appeared. ­There was no magic, no Kabbalah, no Oration, and much less of the works than the life—­just “many valuable treatises which are still extant.”99 Jesup knew from Gilberte’s Life about her b ­ rother’s unfinished Apology for the Christian Religion, though he showed no more awareness of the text now called the Pensées than of Pico’s Oration. In fact, the Pensées say more about dignité than Pico’s speech says about dignitas. What a piece of work is man and what a puzzle for Pascal: “How strange, how monstrous, how chaotic, how given to contradiction—­what a prodigy! Judge over all t­ hings, beastly worm in the dirt; vessel of truth, sewer of uncertainty and error; glory of the universe and garbage.” When God created man in the state of grace, his stature was godlike. But sin disgraced him and left him just another animal—­except that he could think. Now he always thinks of death, and it terrifies him—­left hanging “between two chasms of infinity and nothingness.” U ­ nless grace prevails, death is the Absolute Master: “The last act is bloody, no ­matter how fine the rest of the comedy; they throw dirt on your head, and that’s it forever.”100



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One of Pascal’s aphorisms declares that “all our value (dignité) lies in thought” and that “to think well . . . ​is the basis of morality.” Man in nature is feeble and flimsy, “only a reed, . . . ​but a thinking reed,” nobler than the material world that overwhelms him just “­because he knows he is ­dying, while the universe has no notion of the advantage that it holds over him.” Death forces the h ­ uman subject to reflect: “he is made to think, which is all his value (dignité) and all his merit,” and “his greatness comes from knowing his misery.” Distress about the ­human condition is the heart of ­human knowing.101 In one of his 900 Conclusions, Pico dealt more abstractly with knowing, claiming that “­there is a way through numbers to investigate and understand every­thing knowable (omnis scibilis).” The adjective scibilis implies a restriction to some type of scientia—­the knowable as distinct from the believable (faith), imaginable (fantasy), and so on. The context is mathe­matics—­ certainly an attraction for Pascal if he ever saw the t­ heses. Plainly, Pico’s point was not the scope of his own learning or the content of the Conclusions. Nonetheless, ­others described his grandiose proj­ect as de omni scibili—­On Every­thing Knowable. Pascal, perhaps thinking of Pico, used the phrase in the sequence of fragments that strands mankind between infinity and the void. “A few persons have come to the point of claiming to know every­thing,” he warned, and “this has given rise to ordinary titles like . . . ​ Foundations of Philosophy and so on, actually as sumptuous—­though not so obvious—as the one that dazzles our eyes with Every­thing Knowable.”102 Was Pico the pansophist who failed to impress Pascal? This is a small question about a ­great text that has fascinated even more readers than Pico’s Oration—­readers now likelier to enjoy the author’s prose than to share his submissive faith or follow his puritan ethics. Jesup’s Chris­tian­ity was closer than any modern kind to Pascal’s and Pico’s, and he saw their piety as grounds for comparing them. When he found Pico’s soul in Pascal’s body, however, he was thinking of Gilberte’s Life, not the Pensées. She remembered her ­brother for the “Christian morality to which he consecrated all the talents that God had given him”—an exemplary and self-­ consuming faith to bear in mind when considering l­ater revisions of Pico’s story.103

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Pico Raving the au­t hen­tic philosophy (philosophia arcani) where poetic talent feeds on raving. —­k a nt

1. ​Scholars and Syncretists Edward Jesup’s life of Pico abridges More’s Lyfe, which abridges Gianfrancesco’s Vita, and only this earliest biography has a few words of praise for the Oration that made such a s trong impression on Thomas Traherne. Even he, like many other readers, ­stopped ­after the first few pages. The rest of the speech was useless to him ­because choice and the ­human miracle—­ the issues he found compelling—­quickly dis­appear. The remainder has a ­great deal to say about philosophy, however: Pico wrote the speech to introduce a philosophical debate. When books about the history of philosophy began to appear in Traherne’s lifetime, they remembered Pico, but not ­because he wrote the Oration. Two histories of philosophy—­ventures in a n ew genre like Morhof’s polyhistory—­were published in 1655. One was by Thomas Stanley, who had recently finished a collection titled Poems and Translations. Among the texts he put into En­glish was Pico’s Commento, which he also added— as a “poetical entertainment”—to his History of Philosophy. Traherne had said that Pico’s thinking wandered “wantonly,” and Stanley may have looked down on entertainments. Nonetheless, despite the fantasies in Pico’s dossier, his erudition outweighed them in the 1701 reissue of the History, whose editor praised the author as “another Picus Mirandula.” Stanley’s influence on Pico’s reputation was slight, however, ­because his book covered only the ancients. His program was Baconian, progressive, and 200



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original—up to a point. He presented philosophy as more than a parade of opinions but still as a residue of conflicts between ­great thinkers. He knew Pico’s writings and relied on Re­nais­sance scholarship, but his History—­the only such in En­glish before William Enfield abridged Jacob Brucker’s five volumes in 1791—­said nothing about that period or the ­Middle Ages.1 Meanwhile, in Leiden and also in 1655, Georg Horn brought out a Historia philosophica that he may have finished fifteen years ­earlier. In a chapter on “pagan philosophy” in Italy, he produced the first statement suitable for a Pico Box in the genre that he and Stanley created. Explaining how revived heathen ideas had tempted some Italians to stray from Christian piety, Horn treated Pico as exceptional, the most learned youth of his age who, with exact knowledge of nearly all languages, philosophized with ­great care, winning fame most of all for his admirable work against the astrologers. . . . ​He composed nine hundred conclusions on topics of ­great depth and subtlety and wanted them to be examined by a sort of council of phi­los­o­phers. He invited them to come to Rome from all over Eu­rope, . . . ​but some obscure troublemakers blocked the event. . . . ​ He maintained that ­there is no question, natu­ral or divine, on which Aristotle and Plato do not agree on substance and interpretation, though they may disagree in words. . . . ​He died young, a g­ reat loss to the world of learning.2

Before turning to Pico’s era, Horn had described medieval philosophy ­after “barbarians attacked and philosophy faded away,” to be revived first by Muslims and Jews and ­later by Christian scholastics. Next, ­after exiled Byzantines carried the Greek classics to western Eu­rope, “a brighter light began gradually to emerge from such deep darkness. For when learning was reborn, so to speak, along with the teaching of the Gospel, ­there came a promise of better times.” The task of education was to spread the Word, and the revival of learning in Pico’s day prepared for the Reformation, when “Gospel-­experts in philosophy” like Philip Melanchthon put secular wisdom to sacred use. Horn saw Pico—in this setting, anyhow—as careful, learned, subtle, justly famous, but defeated by envy: he was also forward-­ looking and constructive, an opponent of astrology who harmonized Plato with Aristotle.3

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This ‘concordism,’ as it came to be called, was a point of pride for the prince: the Oration boasts about proving the “concord between Plato and Aristotle” that none had yet demonstrated. Though other disciples of the ancients had failed to reconcile their masters, Pico claimed success, also finding that medieval thinkers like “Scotus and Thomas, Averroes and Avicenna agree in several places where they are thought to disagree.” He rejected the conventional narrative of philosophy’s past, which in his day was sketchy and sectarian: Aristotle defying Plato, Stoics contradicting Epicureans, Nominalists refuting Realists. Endless fighting led nowhere, settling nothing. To label his solution to this strife and futility, Pico took concordia—­a term of praise—­from the lexicon of Roman virtues.4 But Horn’s assessment of Pico’s theory in a chapter on “syncretism” was hostile, darkening his picture of the prince: “This is amazing, that some have attempted syncretism in the midst of so many squabbling sects of phi­los­o­phers who agree with one another no more than water-­clocks. . . . ​ It is ridicu­lous to suppose that philosophical controversies could be settled like lawsuits and de­cided by the ser­vices of a mediator. . . . ​A ­century ago Giovanni Pico also took this position in his celebrated nine hundred ­theses . . . ​, but ­whether he could have proved his point is very doubtful.” Why did Horn doubt Pico? His standard of philosophical pro­gress was religious, and on t­ hose terms trying to reconcile the “squabbling sects” was doomed to failure. Besides Pico’s t­ heses, Horn knew the Apology, but if he also knew the Oration, he never mentioned it.5 Gottfried Olearius, a theologian with Pietist leanings, translated Stanley’s History into Latin in 1702 and added a section on philosophia eclectica to address the same prob­lem of useless controversy. Atheism, deism, and skepticism ­were terrors to good Christians like Olearius. But the ordinary narrative of philosophy, which Stanley seemed to confirm, was sectarian and just as destructive—­many ­battles and never any peace, endless discord that bred disbelief. Phi­los­o­phers could help, however, by selecting godly truths from each warring sect—­after a diligent search through e­ very one of them. Johann Voss (Vossius), an eminent Dutch classicist who died in 1649, had advocated this approach in a posthumous work, ἀ e Sects of Phi­ los­o­phers. Olearius followed Vossius when he enlarged Stanley’s History.6 Vossius wanted to compare each sect with e­ very other and choose the best from all of them, calling this eclectic method the “most laudable, though also the most difficult kind of philosophy.” He took his motto from Horace: “­There is no master whose words I must swear by.” A chapter on



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the “eclectic sect” at the end of his book was his final word. Unlike some Cartesians, he and other Dutch thinkers hoped to reform history and philology, not forget them. Along with clearer procedures and better evidence, the history of philosophy needed a n ew eclectic method—­according to Vossius.7 Abstractly, as an ideal type, the eclectic phi­los­o­pher opposes both syncretists and sectarians. The sects are Platonist, Aristotelian, Thomist, Scotist, and so on. Ignoring authority and heeding only the voice of reason, eclectics pledge allegiance to none of them. Truths must be found where they lie, but the findings w ­ ill be incoherent without an order to put them in. Eclectic phi­los­o­phers therefore also look for ‘systems,’ sets of claims made coherent by agreement, analogy, compatibility, entailment, resemblance, and so on. Eclectic ‘criticism’ exposes the structure of traditional systems to locate “truths scattered through all the sects, separate them from their dogmas, then connect them correctly to fit the right place in a system of one’s own.” When conflicts between sects are papered over, false theories escape criticism. Syncretists never find the truth ­because they ignore crucial distinctions: so said the eclectics.8 At the end of the sectarian road lies futility; the path of syncretism leads to disorder; another ­mistake confuses syncretism with eclecticism ­because neither re­spects sectarian bound­aries. Both syncretists and eclectics can take one truth from Aristotle, another from Plato. But only eclectics are careful to keep dogmas distinct from one another, and only they apply tools of criticism to salvage truths for a new system that ties them together. By ­these standards, Pico’s concordism was not eclectic: it was syncretism—­ philosophically unproductive and morally wrong. Meanwhile, as the prince theorized about concordia, Ficino, Poliziano, and ­others had been reforming classical philology. But their success in reviving the ancients caused confusion and scandal: so many venerable authorities, so deeply divided. Faced with philosophies in conflict, Pico looked beyond contradictions for harmony, though what he produced—by eclectic standards—­ was chaos.9 In the Enlightenment, Pico’s concordia became the sin of syncretism. Yet the Oration cites the same line from Horace that Vossius used as a maxim for eclecticism. “Confining oneself within a single Porch or Acad­ emy is surely the mark of a narrow mind,” says Pico. Only someone who knows “all the phi­los­o­phers can pick out what truly suits him from all of them.” To ‘pick out’ is seligere or eklegein: but Pico never ­imagined what

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l­ater critics would make of eclecticism and syncretism. To Enlightened eyes, the ‘picking out’ in a speech about concordia would look obtuse. But an e­ arlier critic—­Johann Alsted, a L ullian system-­builder who died in 1638—­applied ‘eclectic’ to postmedieval thought in a looser way. Like a few ­later writers, he put Pico in the secta electiva, and he advised a f riend to study the magic in the Conclusions.10 Before and a­ fter the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, harmonies w ­ ere drowned out by shouts of religious hatred. Hugo Grotius survived most of the Thirty Years War, trying to formulate a law of nations to unite feuding Christians. The theologian George Calixt shared his hopes. He pleaded with the churches to reduce doctrine to a few basics that all confessions could endorse; then each could go its own way on smaller m ­ atters. Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics all railed at his moderation. He attracted only a f ew followers and discredited the notion of syncretism while the early histories of philosophy ­were taking shape. Sunkretismos—­originally a po­liti­cal term—­had been rare in ancient Greece and did not mean ‘syncretism,’ though what the term now names was common in Greco-­Roman culture. A ­ fter Calixt, it became a byword for scrambling what must be kept distinct.11 ­After Vossius died, the eclectic campaign gathered force, catching the attention of Jakob Thomasius at Leipzig. Johann Sturm, a mathematician and natu­ral phi­los­o­pher who published a Philosophia electiva in 1679, passed the torch to Jakob’s bolder son, Christian Thomasius, a founder of the German Aufklärung. But Leibniz, Jakob’s student, saw concordia as a virtue in philosophy—­like harmony in metaphysics. While naming Pico—­ “the Phoenix of his age and a foe of astrologers”—in a list of classicists and defenders of Latin eloquence, Leibniz also praised his fairness to scholastic phi­los­o­phers. The younger Thomasius, by contrast, was a fierce critic of syncretism who turned eclecticism into Enlightened ideology. With books, journalism, and teaching provocative enough to be silenced, he attacked dogmatism, prejudice, and superstition while calling for freedom of thought and reform of education and the law.12 In his Philosophy at Court of 1688, Christian Thomasius called phi­los­o­ phers away from theology and the acad­emy to improve society and its laws. Setting revelation aside, he defined the “history of philosophy as the origin and pro­gress of ­human wisdom and folly,” seeing constant conflict between them as the historian’s subject and mankind’s hope. On the side of folly w ­ ere ancient sects that “lost their freedom of thought and fell into servitude.”



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The medieval schools did worse, mixing faith with reason so that they “scarcely deserved the name ‘philosophy.’ ” Luther broke through the muddle, but Protestant and Catholic pedants spoiled his reform. As some scholars recovered ancient ideas, ­others in­ven­ted new ones, yet none sustained eclecticism in its full vigor. Traditional philosophy sat idle in the ruins of calcified opinion—­according to Thomasius. His new philosophy for courtiers off ered eclectic remedies, starting with a quick examination of the “sects of phi­los­o­phers.” Strictly speaking, “only t­ hose deserve the name ‘sects’ that adhere to the teachings and specific positions of a par­tic­u­lar teacher and defend them out of love rather than blind and womanish impulse. Unlike them are Pyrrhonists, who take no positions; eclectics, who take no settled positions; also syncretists, whose clumsy eff orts at conciliation make stable positions unstable; and enemies of philosophy, who repudiate the doctrines of all phi­los­o­phers.” Thomasius supported eclectics for being fair and practical—­unlike sectarians, whose allegiance to a single teacher made them arrogant and dangerous. Syncretists ­were worse: they turned phi­los­o­phers into sophists by forcing ­those who “diff er deeply with one another to distort meaning and pervert language in a way that produces harmony.” Syncretists abused philosophy as badly as ­others who rejected it entirely—­Anabaptists and Rosicrucians or followers of Machiavelli and Valentin Weigel. Thomasius assigned Pico to ­these “vilest sects.”13 Although Thomasius wrote on many topics, his first calling was the law. Starting as a jurist, he found his voice in polemics, both printed journalism and public lectures—­t he latter often banned, the former burned at least once. From Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf he learned the new natu­ral law that threatened ecclesiastical power. His c­ areer was one controversy a­ fter another, and his constant plea was to decriminalize religious diff erences that Christians turned into heresies and punished in the courts. Orthodox Lutherans feared him. Eclecticism was his response, allied with an unorthodox spirituality—­Pietism.14 One of his friends was Johann Budde, a p olymath who studied Kabbalah, theorized about angels and astrology, and helped establish the history of philosophy in Germany. Budde, Thomasius, and other professors at Halle opposed Christian Wolff ’s eff orts to construct a scholastic rationalism on foundations built by Leibniz. When Pietist theologians drove Wolff out of Halle in 1723, he left u ­ nder threat of hanging, and Budde (though not Thomasius) was one of his accusers. Wolff ’s system eventually prevailed,

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while Budde and a few other Halle alumni propagated the innovating (and partly mystical) legacy left by Thomasius, which survived through midcentury.15 From the start, a­ fter Budde began teaching moral philosophy in 1694, he published incessantly, and his writings—­including an edition of a book by the younger Pico—­were often reprinted. On the older Pico he sometimes stayed with the usual script, e­ ither merely listing the Oration with other titles or skipping it, and for biography he relied on Gianfrancesco’s Vita and the brief entry in Morhof’s Polyhistor. As a s erious student of Kabbalah, however, he took more notice of Pico’s discoveries, declaring (like Reuchlin) that “before him the words ‘Kabbalah’ and ‘Kabbalist’ w ­ ere unknown in the Latin language.” For the most part, Budde was friendly to the prince. He gave him credit for improving himself, and he had doubts about critics of the Conclusions, which “had all been approved by learned men and wise theologians.” What mainly interested him in the ­theses was Kabbalah. He printed the final seventy-­two propositions—­the Kabbalah that Pico attached to his own name. In all his works, according to Budde, the prince “proved himself such that anyone would find it hard to decide which to admire more, his talent and judgment or his abundant learning.” This was his verdict in a History of Hebrew Philosophy.16 Elsewhere Budde told a dif­fer­ent story. In a journal launched in 1700, he took on the syncretists for “ruining the real purpose of philosophers”—­ Pico’s m ­ istake when he tried to reconcile Aristotle with Plato. He and other syncretists simply wanted to erase disagreement, unlike eclectics who subject all conflicts of opinion to the same test of reason. Budde was influenced by August Francke, the noted Pietist, and protecting religious dissent was part of his proj­ect, though he was more cautious about it than Thomasius. His opposition to Wolff gave some the impression that he opposed reasoned criticism on princi­ple, despite his eclectic pledge “to swear by no one’s word and explore them all.”17 An energetic theorist of the eclecticism advocated by Budde and Thomasius was Christoph Heumann, also a student of Thomasius and a­ fter 1734 a theologian at the new university in Göttingen, where he translated the New Testament while working to unify evangelical churches with a rationalized Chris­tian­ity. If only faith would shed puzzling dogmas like the real presence and hard teachings like predestination, he maintained, philosophy could put religion on the road to reason. Starting in 1715, as editor of the



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new Acta philosophorum—­the first journal of the history of philosophy—­ Heumann built a constituency for his hopes.18 Reason ruled in Greek philosophy, he explained, ­until superstition—as distinct from barbarism—­corrupted it in late antiquity. Vari­ous types of irrationalism started with ­mistakes made by ancient pagans, and medieval thinkers changed only the face of superstition, not its substance. Luther put Christians back on the straight and narrow: some stayed scholastic, while ­others took dif­fer­ent paths, ­either sectarian—­Platonists, Peripatetics, Kabbalists, and theosophists—or eclectic. The first eclectic was Peter Ramus, whom ­others followed ­until eclecticism “in our happy age has gained the upper hand.” Heumann gave Re­nais­sance philosophy some credit, if only for opening the way to Reform. Some Italians w ­ ere helpful, but not Pico, remembered only for the inscription on his tomb in San Marco.19 By far the most influential practitioner of Heumann’s theory was Jakob Brucker, who read theology with him and Budde at Jena and lived u ­ ntil 1770. The first edition of his Critical History of Philosophy was complete by 1742 in five fat volumes. He loathed e­ very kind of syncretism, both old and new. Evaluating ancient philosophy, he distrusted Neoplatonists as unreliable witnesses to other sects that they described. Even more confused ­were medieval scholastics who mingled theology with philosophy and enslaved reason to bad dogma. Like Heumann, Brucker described the Re­nais­sance as productive, but only the Reformation was decisive in overcoming superstition. Phi­los­o­phers of Pico’s period might have done more good had they venerated the ancients less. Brucker’s choice for the first genuine eclectic was Francis Bacon.20 One of Brucker’s volumes covered postmedieval and pre-­Cartesian philosophy, along with ­later figures who fell short of the eclectic ideal. Thomas Burnet and Amos Comenius ­were “Mosaic and Christian Phi­los­o­phers.” Weigel and Robert Fludd ­were “theosophists.” Agostino Steucho and Guillaume Postel promoted syncretism. Tracing ­these epidemics through a hundred pages, Brucker described exiles from the Greek East carry­ing Pythagorean and Platonic ideas to Italy, where Ficino’s followers mixed them with Hermetic and Zoroastrian teachings for Pico’s disciples to pass on as “Pythagorean-­Platonic-­Kabbalist philosophy.” This absurd novelty emerged when Ficino not only mixed Platonism with alien teachings but also attributed this concoction to legendary sages like Orpheus and Zoroaster. Seduced by Kabbalah but stymied by its obscurity and the rar-

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ity of books about it, some—­like Cornelius Agrippa, Francesco Giorgio, and Reuchlin—­hoped in vain that a s purious genealogy would clarify Hebrew mysteries.21 Brucker’s account of Pico in this first detailed history of Re­nais­sance philosophy could not have been more hostile: “He belongs among the syncretists of more recent times, the plague that swept through philosophy from Platonists in Alexandria to Christians of the East and from them, with the help of pseudo-­Dionysius, to ­those in the West, among whom, ­after Pletho and Bessarion, the most zealous in propping it up ­were Pico della Mirandola and Ficino, from whom it passed to o ­ thers.” This was Brucker’s summation, condemning Pico’s syncretism, saying nothing about the dignity of man. Brucker started by digesting Gianfrancesco’s Vita: Pico was the precocious Phoenix who traveled far, read widely, hunted secrets, chased fame, invited jealousy, suff ered condemnation, mended his ways, attacked astrologers and Jews, gave his money to the poor, and died before his time. Unlike Gianfrancesco, however, Brucker attributed the papal sanction against Pico to his views on magic. Using some of the nephew’s language, he noted the ­uncle’s eff ort “to distinguish natu­ral magic from the irreligious and criminal kind” but still blamed magic for the ensuing scandal and for doubts about the prince’s orthodoxy. Envy inflamed his critics, who found his ideas outlandish and his arguments unintelligible. Brucker repeated Gianfrancesco’s assurance that the Conclusions ­were orthodox but assumed that his readers would still “discern what this barbaric, Egyptian, Kabbalist, Chaldaean philosophy was like that Pico pursued—­ obviously something that pious fraud had falsified with antique names to better support the truth of religion.” Better informed about Kabbalah than Christians of Pico’s time, Brucker mocked the prince for being fooled by fake sources. Gullibility about “Oriental and Platonic lunacy” was his heritage from Ficino. “But in explicating Platonism his ­mistakes ­were worse,” Brucker declared: “Anyone who looks at his Kabbalist t­ heses w ­ ill clearly see that Pico knew nothing about Kabbalah. . . . ​Nearly intolerable is his seduction by a p erverted zeal for coupling and conciliating sacred doctrines with Kabbalistic notions, putting square pegs in round holes and mixing tonics with toxins, the fair with the foul, . . . ​thereby making himself the author of philosophy’s corruption and the debasement of true doctrine, . . . ​clumsily mixing every­ thing together—­Kabbalist, Pythagorean, Platonic, Aristotelian, Jewish



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and Christian—­and sadly confusing them all.” In Brucker’s stern judgment, Pico was a credulous threat to Christian learning. His naiveté stirred up the syncretism that infected philosophy forever a­ fter. Greek thought polluted by Oriental error produced “a new kind of philosophical sect, the Pythagorean-­Platonic-­Kabbalistic, to give this bizarre syncretism its right name.” No exaltation of h ­ uman dignity registered with Brucker. His silence is remarkable in light of Pico’s l­ater reputation—­especially in the Anglophone tradition, much influenced by the Critical History as a response to Bacon’s challenge to track intellectual pro­gress with careful scholarship. In its Enlightenment context, the History’s criticisms of Pico seem all the harsher: when he and ­others excavated the old sects, they simply reinstated errors that should have been discarded; their way of reviving ancient philosophy was a detour from pro­gress—as Brucker saw it. To achieve philosophical concord, Pico muffled conflict, thus blunting the strife that he should have sharpened if he had ­really been soldiering for reason. Lost in the labyrinth of Kabbalah, he compounded the confusions of ancient Neoplatonists. At best, he was a vagabond on the back roads of philosophy, at worst a vagrant who spread the plague of syncretism.22 Brucker’s Critical History set a new Eu­ro­pean standard, and at midcentury the authors of the Encyclopédie began mining his big volumes. Denis Diderot followed the History closely in a long entry on éclectisme. Ignoring antiquity, authority, consensus, and tradition, the eclectic has no favorites among the many thinkers who inform his “private and domestic philosophy.” His opposite is the syncretist, a “true sectary” who has a leader and carries his name, . . . ​no ­matter which. The only freedom that he keeps for himself is to modify his master’s views, to shrink or expand his ideas . . . ​and to shore up the system when it threatens to collapse. Imagine an insolent beggar, unhappy with the rags that cover him, who throws himself upon passers-by who are better clothed, snatching a shirt from one, a coat from another, and using the loot to make a strange assemblage of any shade and e­ very patch: t­ here you have the very emblem of the syncretist.23

A looser ideology colored the few lines about Pico himself in the Encyclopédie, contributed by the Chevalier de Jaucourt: he said nothing explic­itly about syncretism, and his source was Voltaire—­not Brucker. The article is actually a geo­graph­i­cal entry on the region of Mirandola, but half of it,

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while getting the prince’s name wrong, salutes his skill in languages and his im­mense genius. And yet in ­those days, according to Jaucourt, knowing so much was easy b ­ ecause t­ here was so l­ ittle to know: it was all Albertus and Aquinas, the “incomprehensible gibberish of Peripatetic theology.” Still, the scandal of the condemned t­ heses made Pico as famous in his time as Newton was for Jaucourt’s readers, though heresy hunters could have found any crime they wanted in the maze of the Conclusions. Rather than waste his youth on such nonsense, their author should have devoted himself to the “pleasant beauties of Vergil, Dante and Petrarch.”24 Jaucourt condescended to Pico and to the Renaissance—in keeping with D’Alembert’s princi­ples in the Preliminary Discourse of the Encyclopédie. The Discourse complains that the prime directive of modern epistemology—­“we owe all our ideas to sensations”—­had been subverted in the Re­nais­sance by the (Platonic) theory of innate ideas. By recovering from this error, Locke opened a route to the new cultural terrain mapped by D’Alembert: “Since that memorable epoch”—­the Renaissance—­“we find that this pro­gress . . . ​began with erudition, continued with fine lit­er­ a­ture and finished with philosophy.” The Byzantine Empire fell, Greek scholars brought ancient knowledge to the West, princely patronage supported the new learning, and printing spread it all over Eu­rope. Despite all that, the new refugees from barbarism found themselves in a sort of infancy, ­eager to accommodate ideas, but incapable of first acquiring them in a definite sequence. . . . ​They thought they needed only to read in order to become learned, and reading something is far easier than actually looking at it. And so without discriminating they devoured every­t hing the ancients left. . . . ​This gave rise to that multitude of erudite persons, immersed in learned languages to the point of disdaining their own, who . . . ​understood every­t hing about the ancients except their grace and finesse, . . . ​and whose empty show of erudition made them arrogant.25

Kant called his c­ entury an Age of Criticism ­after the philosophes described the Re­nais­sance as an Age of Erudition—­for them a pejorative. D’Alembert’s article on erudition trivialized scholarship and sneered at it. “To add to the discoveries of a Descartes or a Newton,” he explained, “requires a degree of genius and talent that few p ­ eople attain. On the other hand, t­ here is no one who has eyes, patience and memory who cannot become quite erudite by force of reading. Should one despise erudition for this reason? Not at all.”



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The sarcasm reflects damage done to scholarship e­ arlier in the ­century during the B ­ attle of the Books.26 Starting in 1684, Pierre Bayle had reported on that combat in News of the Republic of Letters, nominally a journal for book reviews. His Historical and Critical Dictionary followed in 1696, eventually filling four volumes with dense and complicated articles that left more questions than they answered. At first sight, the main entries seem straightforward, but exceedingly long notes—­and notes to the notes—­often suggest more than they say. Although Bayle wrote no article on Pico for his Dictionary, he and his nephew are often mentioned in remarks that usually link the ­uncle with superstition and unconventional ideas. Louis Moréri’s ­Great Historical Dictionary, a w ork of conventional scholarship that Bayle wanted to replace, had given Pico his own entry, repeating a w ell-­k nown defense (by Gabriel Naudé) against charges of illicit magic. Moréri’s sympathies ­were on the surface, but Bayle enticed his readers to dig deeper. Annotating an article on Savonarola, he cited claims that the friar “inspired Giovanni Pico to write against judicial astrology,” adding that the “reason given for Savonarola’s hatred of astrology”—­ occupational jealousy among soothsayers—­“seems fanciful.” If Pico opposed astrology on Savonorola’s say-so, was his own opposition also far-­ fetched? Leaving questions unanswered and thoughts unfinished, Bayle distilled erudition into equivocation, staying a step away from skepticism or cynicism. Voltaire admired Bayle’s subtlety as much as he distrusted Leibniz’s optimism and windowless monads. In Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon earthquake, Leibniz shows nothing in the best of all pos­si­ble worlds. . . . Farewell, Epicurus; Plato, goodbye: Bayle knows more than you both. Weighing it all, doubt is his doctrine.27

Voltaire found Bayle’s erudition exceptional ­because it undermined itself and provoked doubt, whereas ordinary scholarship was useless ­because it left the mind empty, merely replicating and explicating old documents that transmitted neither sensations nor ideas. Voltaire and the encyclopedists took their epistemic bearings from British empiricists but also from Cartesian rationalists, who found learning duller than wit and ranked philology below philosophy. Edward Gibbon, their con­temporary, attacked

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D’Alembert’s Discourse for just that reason—­making too much of philosophy, not enough of erudition. Vico said the same. But the philosophes ­were not professors of philosophy. They w ­ ere beaux esprits and gens des lettres, more persuasive than phi­los­o­phers, and none more persuasive than Voltaire. This is what he put into a Pico Box, the most damning of them all, from a c hapter of his Essai sur les moeurs that follows a d iscussion of Savonarola.28

If Savonarola’s adventure reveals the fanat­i­cism that still existed, the t­ heses of the young Prince of Mirandola show us the state of the sciences. In Florence and in Rome, among ­people then the most talented on earth, ­t hese two dif­fer­ent scenes unfold. One easily concludes from them how dark it was elsewhere and how slowly h ­ uman reason takes shape. A standing proof of the superiority of the Italians of that time is that Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, a sovereign prince, was a prodigy of learning and memory from his tenderest youth: in our day, he would have been a prodigy of genuine erudition. Hunger for knowledge was so strong in him that in the end he renounced his principality and retired to Florence, where he died on the same day when Charles VIII entered the city. They say that at the age of eigh­ teen he knew twenty-­t wo languages, though surely not in the normal course of nature since t­ here is no language that does not need a year or so to learn well. We may suspect that someone who knows twenty-­two while still so young knows them rather badly, or rather knows their rules, which is knowing nothing. Still more extraordinary: this prince, having studied so many languages, could go to Rome at the age of twenty-­four and defend ­t heses on all the topics of knowledge, omitting not even one. At the beginning of his works are fourteen hundred general conclusions that he off ered to debate. The only t­ hing worth the bother in this im­mense undertaking is a l­ ittle elementary geometry and astronomy. The rest just shows the spirit of the times. It’s the Summa of St.  Thomas; it’s a d igest of works by Albert, called the G ­ reat; it’s theology mixed with Peripateticism. ­There one sees that an angel is infinite secundum quid, that animals and plants are born from a



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corruption animated by productive virtue. This is the approach everywhere. This is what one learned in all the universities. Thousands of students stuff ed their heads with t­ hese monstrosities and stayed u ­ ntil they w ­ ere forty at the schools that taught them. Nowhere on earth did p ­ eople know any better. Th ­ ose who ruled the world could be forgiven, then, if they held the sciences in contempt. Pico della Mirandola had the bad luck to spend his life and shorten his days with this alarming lunacy. ­After Dante and Petrarch, a very small number had escaped this benighted erudition ­because they ­were born with true genius cultivated by reading the best Roman authors. Their works w ­ ere more to the taste of princes, politicians, noblewomen and noblemen who want nothing from reading but a p leasant diversion; t­ hese might have suited the Prince of Mirandola better than compilations by Albert the G ­ reat. But passion for universal knowledge carried him away, when universal knowledge consisted of knowing by heart—on any topic—­a few words that delivered no ideas at all. For p ­ eople who reason with such grace and precision about the world’s business and their own aff airs, it’s hard to comprehend how, on almost any other question, they could have deluded themselves with unintelligible words. The reason? Their wish to appear learned rather than learn. Once the teachers of error have bent our souls double when ­we’re young, we ­don’t even attempt to straighten them out; instead we push them down again. Thus it happens that vulgar error molds many minds that are full of shrewdness, even genius; thus Pascal and Arnauld, who ­were ­great ­people, ended in fanat­i­cism. Pico della Mirandola wrote against judicial astrology, to be sure. But make no ­mistake: he wrote against the astrology practiced in his own day while permitting another. This was the ancient, the genuine astrology, he said, which had been neglected. He says in his first proposition that magic, as it is ­today and is condemned by the Church, is not based on truth ­because it depends on powers hostile to truth. From ­t hese words—­contradictory as they are—­one sees that he would grant that magic is the work of demons, as commonly believed. He is also sure that t­ here is no power in

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s t o r i e s a bo u t p i c o heaven or earth that a magician cannot make active, and he proves that speech is efficacious in magic ­because God used speech to put the world together. ­These notions caused more fuss and raised more commotion than was heard in our day when Newton made his discoveries and Locke researched his truths. Pope Innocent VIII condemned thirteen propositions from this w ­ hole ­great body of learning. His censures ­were like verdicts from ­t hose Indians who condemned the idea that a dragon holds up the world ­because, according to them, only an elephant could hold it up. Pico della Mirandola made his apology and complained about his judges. One of them, he noted, had reacted violently to Kabbalah: “But ­don’t you know,” the young Prince said to him, “what this Kabbalah means? ” “What a q uestion!” replied the theologian. “­Isn’t it obvious that Kabbalah was a heretic who wrote against Jesus Christ?” Pope Alexander VI, who was good enough at least to hold ­t hese disputes in contempt, fi­nally had to send him absolution. It’s notable that he treated Pico della Mirandola just like Savonarola. The story of the Prince of Mirandola is simply the tale of a scholar full of genius seeking his way through a vast pit of error, a blind man guided by blind masters. The result is a story by masters of lies who base their power on ­human stupidity.

Chimères . . . ​démences . . . ​ténèbres . . . ​stupidité: corrosive syllables dripped from Voltaire’s pen, and Pico hit bottom in Eu­rope’s memory.29 Despite its title, Voltaire’s Essay is mainly about politics and war, a very long revue starring famous men, mostly rulers and warriors, with its finale at the court of Louis XIII. Kings and armies drive a parallel narrative about moeurs—­be­hav­ior, culture, customs, ethics, manners—­and Eu­rope’s moral ­career: the emergence of Christendom from medieval darkness and subsequent pro­gress ­toward Enlightenment. Only one figure whose work was purely intellectual—­Pico—­has a f ull chapter to himself, though Luther, Savonarola, and a few other thinkers stand out from the politics. The infamy that Voltaire wanted to crush was medieval: “barbarous feudal customs, unstable and agitated, duels, tournaments, scholastic philosophy and magic spells.” While France and Northern Eu­rope stumbled



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in darkness, the light dawned in Italy when Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio overcame the bad taste of their contemporaries to write elegant vernacular texts instead of clumsy Latin. At the same time, Cimabue, Giotto, and Brunelleschi rescued the fine arts in Italy “from the ruins of barbarism.” Florence emerged as a new Athens from a renewal of the ­human spirit that peaked in the sixteenth ­century with Italian poetry and painting. Philosophy still waited on Galileo for its re­nais­sance.30 On Voltaire’s scoreboard, Pico lost. His vaunted command of languages was superficial; his famous t­ heses w ­ ere scholastic rubbish; he condoned astrology and confirmed demonic magic. As for Kabbalah, Voltaire exploited Pico’s defense of it to set up a joke. Unlike Dante and Petrarch, he concluded, the prince went wrong by trying to outrun the cycles of history. Some poets had the good sense to drop classical mimesis for belletristic vernaculars, keeping up with the parade as Eu­rope’s culture moved on from memory and scholarship to imagination and the arts. Impetuously in advance of his age, Pico rushed to philosophy before the higher faculty of reason had time to ripen. What a waste: instead of pillaging the ancients to make graceful rhymes and charm the ladies, he entombed himself with the unspeakable scholastics—­a medieval throwback even before Victor Hugo, hélas! Voltaire filled his Pico Box with delicious polemic but dismal scholarship. He mistook his subject’s name (not Gianfrancesco) and the number of his ­theses (not 1,400), neglecting facts for a witty story and a pointed moral. Erudition itself—­meaning not just education but advanced learning in classical philology and antiquities—­was part of his evidence for the prince’s bad taste. In the combat between ancients and moderns, the same wits whose literary norms w ­ ere rigidly neoclassical (Voltaire sensed “more barbarism than genius” in Shakespeare) ridiculed antiquarians who supplied the makings of their classicizing style. As an heir to the Querelle, Voltaire wrote unscholarly history as a m ­ atter of princi­ple and a fashion statement. When he said of Pico that “in our day he would have been a prodigy of genuine erudition,” he was not being kind.31 Another theme of his blast at Pico is fanatisme, which links his chapter on the prince with the preceding account of Savonarola. The grotesque spectacle of the friar’s execution—­three Dominicans strangled and burned, miracles attributed to a martyred priest, an indulgence issued by a degenerate pope—is one “whose like you w ­ ill find neither among the Romans and Greeks nor among the barbarians. It is the fruit of the worst form of

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government and the vilest superstition that ever made p ­ eople mindless. But you realize that not much time has passed since we stepped out of ­those shadows and that light does not shine everywhere.” Dogmatism, intolerance, superstition, theocracy, torture, and other outrages made fanatics of Savonarola, his acolytes, and his killers. Voltaire located this savagery in the new Tuscan Attica and elided it with the “state of the sciences” expressed by Pico’s ­theses. Re­nais­sance Florence was far from enlightened, and the ideas jumbled up in Pico’s propositions ­were not clear or distinct. Voltaire did not call Pico a fanatic—­directly, at least. But he accused him of succumbing to enemies of promise who clouded the light of young genius with dogmatism and turned students into puppets of tradition, which also explained why “Pascal . . . ​ended in fanat­i­cism.” Edward Jesup had compared Pascal and Pico as heroes of abnegation who abandoned the world for a heroism of the heart and spirit. For Voltaire, however, the reasons of the heart that Pascal put above reason w ­ ere whims of a fanatic.32 Fanatisme, enthusiasm, Schwärmerei—­these terms of abuse, along with ‘erudition’ as a p ejorative—­entered the lexicon of Pico’s infamy in the ­middle of the eigh­teenth ­century, and the new vocabulary persisted in stories told about him l­ater in the Enlightenment, as historians reevaluated his contributions to philosophy. For updated guidance, phi­los­o­phers consulted Immanuel Kant, using his critical system to clear a path through jungles of superstition. They also had to contend with novel pre­sen­ta­tions of old delusions b ­ ecause the occult philosophy—an original construct when Agrippa outlined it in 1533—­had picked up its own load of erudition.33

2. ​Judaizers and Stargazers Disdain like Voltaire’s for scholarship was the point of Kant’s only remark about Pico, “one of the prodigies of memory, . . . ​polyhistorians who carry around in their heads . . . ​a load of books for a hundred camels . . . ​, perhaps lacking the . . . ​judgment suitable for choosing.” Once again, Pico was charged with breaking laws enacted by eclectics. But Kant did not connect him with the Kabbalah that Budde and ­others had described in detail. The lone mention of “Anti-­Kabbalah” in Kant’s attack on Emanuel Swedenborg is a slur without content. In the same way, authors e­ arlier than Kant had been using Cabala in Latin along with vernacular derivatives as generic labels for mystification—­without (much) prejudice to race or religion.



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Kant’s polemic about Swedenborg, Dreams of a Spirit-­Seer, was an early work, published fifteen years before the first Critique. Many enlightened eclectics had already declared themselves against superstition—­hence hostile not only to Pico’s syncretism but also to the magic and Kabbalah promoted by the Oration. ­Earlier, however, when the younger Thomasius and Budde w ­ ere active, they and some of their colleagues kept their minds open about occultism. And before aggressive eclecticism made Pico unredeemable, his attack on astrology in the Disputations still seemed respectable: the heroic Campanella had used it in his early work—­even though the prince “philosophized more about words than within nature.” Some who remembered Pico’s Heptaplus or his controversy with Barbaro forgot the Oration. ­Others treated the orator mainly as a Platonist and concordist, while friendlier judges—­like Gabriel Naudé—­dismissed charges of criminal magic as jealousy of his genius: “Many wrongly believed he could have acquired such talent and wisdom only by magical means.”34 In 1690, two years a­ fter Thomasius published Philosophy at Court, a reference guide to authors and their books magnified Pico’s fame again. This Appraisal of Better-­Known Writers was the pedantic masterpiece of Sir Thomas Pope Blount, a poet, essayist, natu­ral historian, and county dignitary. Starting with Hermes Trismegistus and stopping with Thomas Hobbes, he gave a page or two to each of a few hundred notables as other writers described them. The cata­log includes Re­nais­sance celebrities from Petrarch through Erasmus, and one of them is Pico. Blount compiled fifteen short accounts of the prince by Poliziano, Paolo Giovio, and ­later writers. None of the excerpts comments on the Oration, which appears only in a list of titles. All fifteen statements praise the prodigy “rightly called the Phoenix of his age”—­except for some gossip relayed by Sisto of Siena. Sisto, born in 1520, was reputedly a J ew who converted, joined the Franciscans, faced charges of heresy, and switched to the Dominicans: some of the drama may have been concocted, however. Two popes protected him, in any case, and one had his help in destroying copies of the Talmud. But Sisto claimed that he rescued the Zohar, the most impor­tant work of Kabbalah. His Sacred Library of 1566 became a s tandard guide to biblical studies. The book was durable, and for the next two centuries the author faded in and out of the tangled tale of occultism. Sisto was cautious about Kabbalah. Thinking of Pico’s distinction between natu­ral and demonic magic, he distinguished a t rue Kabbalah

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approved by biblical patriarchs from a false one used by Jews to conjure demons. On the Heptaplus he hedged his bets: “Some admire it as learned and lofty, while o ­ thers despise it as a display of juvenile arrogance.” When Sisto quizzed Luigi Lippomanno—­a bishop with expertise on the Church ­Fathers—­about not citing the Heptaplus in a passage that called for it, the bishop answered with the “greatest intensity of speech and expression.” ­Because Pico used “words and sayings of Moses to express . . . ​his own fantasies,” Lippomanno felt ­free to ignore him.35 Christians could be accused of Judaizing just for studying Kabbalah. ­After vicious attacks on Reuchlin, the Church condemned other Christian Kabbalists and put their books on the Index. Outlandishly arcane theories ­were easy targets—­especially when the methods applied to sacred mysteries like the Trinity ­were rabbinical. Most of the outrage was raw bigotry, while Lippomanno, Sisto, and other exegetes debated technical issues like the chronology of Kabbalah, which Pico had traced to Moses on Mount Sinai. Scholars still consulted Sisto’s Sacred Library in the eigh­teenth ­century. This durable book came from an e­ arlier time, however, when the prince’s standing was less settled and Christian Kabbalah was changing rapidly. While destroying some Hebrew texts, the Vatican published ­others, and Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo—­a power­ful churchman who was Reuchlin’s con­temporary—­promoted Kabbalah, though not in print. When the hesitations noted by Sisto caught Blount’s eye at the end of the seventeenth ­century, Pico’s reputation was eroding, and the w ­ hole “occult philosophy”— in Cornelius Agrippa’s famous formulation—­seemed more and more disreputable.36 In ­matters of fame, the top of Pico’s life was also a bottom: bold proclamations in the Oration, then papal condemnation of the Conclusions. The resulting fight about magic and Kabbalah continued ­after he died, and the ­theses ­were not printed again for almost fifty years—­a lthough copies circulated in manuscript. One hard blow came quickly from Pedro Garcias, a Spanish bishop who sat on a committee appointed to examine the Conclusions. In 1489 the bishop’s Magisterial Determinations replied to Pico’s Apology and denounced him for sinning with magic. This charge of illicit magic, in vari­ous vague senses of the term, stayed with the prince.37 Astrology caused even more contention once Pico’s nephew published the Disputations in 1496. From Lucio Bellanti’s Responses through Jean-­ Baptiste Morin’s Gallic Astrology and beyond, scores, if not hundreds, of



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contestants fought in print about heavenly influence and horoscopic predictions: some endorsed Pico’s arguments; some rejected them. Pico’s unfinished book convinced Agrippa von Nettesheim, Symphorien Champier, Gregor Reisch, and many, many o ­ thers. Kepler respected its reasoning—­ with reservations. But the roster of Pico’s opponents was also distinguished: Philip Melanchthon, Agostino Nifo, Francesco Patrizi, Pietro Pomponazzi, Giovanni Pontano, and Pontus de Tyard—to name a few. Some found his attack on astrology extreme and his pre­sen­ta­tion wordy. Cynics said he had it in for astrologers ­because they predicted his death. His birth chart could be checked in books of celebrity horoscopes that gave early modern readers the low-­down on the rich, famous, and star-­crossed.38 Hebraica veritas was another ­hazard. Although Pico’s most daring novelty—­his Kabbalah—­was a m agnet for imitators, Hebrew philology was as unsafe as Jewish mysticism in a w orld of truculent Christians. Reuchlin, who traveled to Italy and met the prince, paid a price for Hebrew scholarship in 1520: ­after years of strug­gle, a pa pacy preoccupied by Luther’s rebellion condemned him. This was two years ­after Pietro Mainardi’s Report about Kabbalah—­showing how to combine Hebrew secrets with the art of Ramon Lull—­had made it into print, though Reuchlin’s earliest exploration of Kabbalah, ἀ e Wonder-­Working Word, had already appeared in 1494. Like other pioneers of Christian Kabbalah, Reuchlin credited Pico with revealing the Hebrew mysteries for the first time. Over the next two centuries, Kabbalists and anti-­Kabbalists ­were fewer than astrologers and their critics, but they all looked back to Pico—to copy or condemn him. Impor­tant support for Pico’s Hebraism came from two books in Latin by Francesco Giorgio (Zorzi)—­ἀ e Harmony of the World in 1525 and Prob­lems in 1536. The e­ arlier work reached a wider audience in a French translation by Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie, whose ­brother Nicolas also produced a vernacular Heptaplus. Giorgio’s student Arcangelo de Borgonovo ­ ese riddling published commentaries on Pico’s Kabbalist Conclusions. Th propositions excited the experts and puzzled them, though the prince’s message was simpler in the Oration and more explicit in the Apology. When Gilbert Génébrard, a renowned Hebraist, assessed his writings, they ­were found wanting: Kabbalah was not the wisdom approved by the ancient F ­ athers. Nonetheless, Johann Pistorius included the t­ heses in his Art of Kabbalah, an unfinished proj­ect published in 1587 that became a valued work of reference.39

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Stars shining as bright as Pico produce reflections. For a few years a­ fter 1519, Tiberio Russiliano shopped himself and 400 propositions in the prince’s style to several universities ­until he wore out his welcome, exhausted Medici protection, and was murdered in 1560. By then the bidding on propositions had climbed to 1,553, the number that Pavao Skalić—­a Croatian who called himself Scaliger and boasted several titles—­said he was ready to argue in that very year. Like Pico, he came young to the world of learning and toured many cities. But the Jesuits—­more alarmed by his religious versatility than impressed by his learning—­declined his off er to debate 12,000 t­ heses in Rome. Angry to be ignored, Skalić confronted the “Roman Anti-­Christ”—­the General of the Society of Jesus—in the voice of the Apostle Paul. Defying the Whore of Babylon who insulted him and called him a Judaizer, Skalić insisted that he was a “Christian born of Christian parents, . . . ​neither a magus, a Jew, an Ishmaelite, nor a heretic.” Th ­ ese defensive words came from Pico’s Apology (and from Jerome). But in the religious strife of the sixteenth c­ entury, the prince’s vision of mystical harmony was risky. And yet memories of his exploits kept encouraging new challengers, some more prudent than Skalić. When Count Carlo Montecucolli died at nineteen in 1611, his ­brother’s bid to enshrine him as yet another new Pico promoted the harmless talent of a Wunderkind in Hebrew.40 As more surveys and anthologies of Kabbalah appeared in the early seventeenth c­ entury, Jews and Christians both weighed the risks. Menasseh ben Israel, a millenarian with a Christian following, knew Pico’s books and used them, while Leon of Modena, a Jew who also wrote for gentiles, vacillated between suspicion and denunciation of Christian Kabbalah. Christians w ­ ere curious about Jewish mysteries b ­ ecause some believed that converting the tribes of Israel would bring in the end times, whereas Jews feared that apostates might abuse holy secrets to aid their new co-­religionists. One convert, Mordechai Crescas, took the name Philippe d’Aquin in 1611 and used Kabbalah to support his new faith. Christians rarely trusted Jewish in­for­mants, however. Even Richard Simon, who thought that the text of the Hebrew Bible was sounder than the Greek of the New Testament, had l­ ittle re­spect for postbiblical Judaism—­“allegories and quirks which some Rabbinist Jews have in­ven­ted.” ­Until his revolutionary scholarship got him defrocked, F ­ ather Simon was an Oratorian. But it was Dominicans who put the Dagger of Faith into print in 1651—­renovating a relic of medieval anti-­ Semitism in the age of Descartes.41



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In 1619 Descartes had his disturbing dreams while soldiering in the last and longest of Eu­rope’s wars of religion. In the same year, a­ fter Christians had been agitated by religious slaughter for nearly a c­ entury, Giulio Cesare Vanini was burned as a heretic in Toulouse, calling up the specter of Giordano Bruno’s execution in 1600. Hoaxing Rosicrucians, hoping for a new Age of Reform, fooled Pa­ri­sians in 1623, a year before commotion about alchemy drew crowds in the city. Gabriel Naudé put out a pa mphlet to expose the nonsense and followed up in 1625 with his Apology for All the ­Great Persons Falsely Suspected of Magic. One of his case studies examines Pico to demonstrate that “suspicion of magic has always been the most common scourge of the learned.” No magic, just ignorance and envy: with that defense, Naudé’s Apology made alchemy, astrology, demonology, divination, Kabbalah, and witchcraft—­Agrippa’s w ­ hole program—­a target for his freethinking friends. History was turning a page, and the occult philosophy had lost prestige by the time Naudé confronted it. Magic had been a s ubject for respectable professors to teach, but he and the ‘learned libertines’ left it an object of mockery—­material for jokes by Molière. Naudé put Pico—­falsely accused of magic—on higher moral ground than his critics, while a m arginal member of his circle, F ­ ather Jacques Gaff arel, was sending the prince’s reputation downhill. With breathless socializing and endless chatter, Gaff arel made his obsessions bearable for Naudé and his sophisticated friends, even though the priest’s Curiosities Unheard-­Of promoted astrology and talismans. Another foolish m ­ istake was picking a fight with a smarter cleric, Marin Mersenne, who accused Gaff arel—­and other Christians—of being lax about Kabbalists, Rosicrucians, and other saboteurs of faith. Mersenne’s roster of subversives was lengthy: along with Agrippa, Bruno, Vanini, and other agents of corruption, he denounced Pico. The flighty Gaff arel, flaunting his support for Naudé’s Apology, rushed to defend Mersenne’s victims in 1625 with Hidden Mysteries of the Divine Kabbalah against Word-­Wars of the Sophists.42 Gaff arel anchored his contentious findings in authority: Pico—­“quite easily the prince of philosophers”—­was a celebrity witness for Kabbalah. To show how Jewish mysticism supported his own faith, the priest listed points “quite useful for the Christian religion from the pious tradition or Kabbalah of the ancient F ­ athers.” Believers armed with such insights would have “no difficulty in overcoming Jews, Arians and other heretics,

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which is clear from the ­theses of the ­great Mirandola.” Gaff arel ­later forgot the bluster and backed off ­under pressure from Mersenne. But good judgment never overtook him.43 Cardinal Richelieu sent him to Italy to hunt for books and old documents. In Venice he bought manuscripts whose provenance pointed to Pico, and in 1651 he published an Index to describe them. Many books of Kabbalah that Pico actually used (and that still survive) had been prepared by Flavius Mithridates, a converso who dosed them with Trinitarian clues for the prince to discover. The scam would be revealed centuries l­ater. Meanwhile an anonymous translator’s (or scribe’s) complaints about Pico’s relations with his employees shocked Gaff arel. While cata­loging the manuscripts, he noticed that “Pico crossed his name out in all the passages where the translator . . . ​railed at him so much that in some places . . . (where Pico’s name can still easily be read along with a certain Margherita’s, who loved him passionately), . . . ​he reproached Pico as far too inquisitive, excessively hungry for honors, sometimes not keeping his word, at other times lying and deceiving, being timid . . . ​and shamelessly vain about his looks.” Gaff arel doubted the charges. And yet Gianfrancesco’s Life seemed compatible with their general drift. Still, the unnamed translator’s bitterness was astonishing, and Gaff arel surmised that his motive was “not being paid. One might also say that this Jew had a natu­ral tendency to savage every­one, ripping not only at Pico but also at a c ertain Mithridates—­ likewise a Jew and mentioned by Pico in his letters, who accuses him of homicidal envy and rage. . . . ​What might a person smeared with such vice feel too ashamed to report? . . . ​On one page . . . ​he complains that he needs a boy.” While milking salacious details without clearing up the miscreant’s identity, Gaff arel remained sympathetic to the prince’s Kabbalist views on the Bible. His Index preserved traces of texts other­wise lost: Johann Wolf reprinted it in his Hebrew Library, where he ranked Pico with “more able writers on Jewish Kabbalah.” But association with the unstable Gaff arel—­ aggravated by rancid stories—­hurt the prince’s standing.44 Sisto da Siena aged better, keeping the guarded re­spect of Richard Simon. In his Critical History of the Old Testament, printed in 1678 but then suppressed, Simon denied that Kabbalah went back to biblical patriarchs. He dismissed it as apocryphal superstition, “idle and ridicu­lous subtilties . . . ​drawn from the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.” For Bible scholars Kabbalah is useless, he concluded, “very far from the study of criticisme,”



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and t­ here is “another sort of Cabbala, which the Jews term practical, which is much more dangerous and belongs to magick. It is nothing but pure illusion and fancy.” Kabbalist ravings ­were not to be confused with the textual work of the Masoretes, genuine experts and reformers. Simon also found Sisto’s Sacred Library useful, even though “in many places his criticism is not exact. . . . ​He has no ground for what he says . . . ​of the books of the Cabbal; the Jews had herein impos’d upon Picus, Count of Mirandula . . . ​ who too easily believed t­ hese imposters [and] occasion’d many o ­ thers to give credit to the books which they sell but u ­ nder Esdras’s name, in which they pretended ­were the most secret mysteries of religion.” Scrutinizing sacred texts was momentous for the Enlightenment—­Kant’s Age of Criticism. By d iscrediting Pico as a reader of the Hebrew Bible, Simon, John Selden, and o ­ thers marred his fame, already scarred by two centuries of ser­vice with the battered armies of occultism.45 True, Naudé defended Pico against magic-­baiters, and the prince was widely admired for opposing astrology. And yet—as astrologers kept insisting—he had not eliminated it, and his flagrant occultism blunted the edge of the Disputations. His stock fell as the Enlightenment gathered strength: his reputation as a K abbalist, in the usual miasma of anti-­ Semitism, was heavy baggage. He had not just encouraged what the new forces of reason reviled as madness; the foolishness that he pioneered was the folly of a Judaizer. He had incited the original attempts to Christianize Kabbalah, enabling the lunacy to spread from Reuchlin through Jacob Böhme into the seventeenth ­century. A ­later craze erupted when Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (whom Leibniz called “impressive”) announced a new unveiling of Kabbalah in 1677. His Kabbalah Laid Bare revealed ­later stages of Jewish mysticism unknown to Pico. And by 1648 Shabbatai Zevi—­a mystical Messiah who studied Kabbalah—­was already headed for prophecy, apostasy, and disgrace.46

3. ​ Schwärmer and Wound-­Worms For Jews and Christians both, the next de­cades ­were tumultuous. As Jews ­were shaken by the scandal of Shabbetai Zevi, new information about their beliefs stimulated Christians like Budde and the younger Thomasius while it hardened the prejudice of ­others. Pietism was an even more turbulent force, starting as an eff ort to reform Lutheran doctrine and practice: with

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such beginnings, the movement could scarcely have been more remote from Pico’s culture. By their enemies Pietists ­were called Schwärmer—an untranslatable term of abuse that ­others would use to defame the prince. Since he died before ­there ­were any Lutherans to despise Pietists as much as they hated papists, how did Pico earn this slander? The moral equivalent of Schwärmerei was as old as religion itself. Early Christians rebuked each other as threats to decency and good order—­the “false apostles and deceitful workers” denounced by Paul in Corinth. As the Church prospered and stabilized, some felt oppressed by sacramental machinery, priestly hierarchy, and ecclesiastical institutions. Mystics—­ Jews, Muslims, and pagans as well as Christians—­wanted to stand closer to God than conventional norms allowed. For the young Luther, bypassing priestcraft was not only righ­teous but also liberating: a priesthood of all believers would dissolve clerical authority. Sinners who took up the Bible and met Jesus face-­to-­face would need no Church to channel grace for them. But Lutheran preachers institutionalized their charisma and acquired assets for other prophets to expropriate. They built their own establishments, defining themselves not only against Roman authority but also against subversives who hatched from Luther’s egg. Especially hateful ­were reckless Anabaptists—­Schwärmer, crazies, outlaw fanatics unfit for godly conversation. Some Christians denounced for Schwärmerei by other Christians claimed personal access to God by way of inner illumination, mystical u ­ nion, pantheist suff usion, supernal emanation, super­natural inspiration, or some other route around ecclesiastical blockades. The En­glish ‘enthusiasm’—­derived from Greek words for the god within—­entered the language around 1600 and became the usual, though far too weak, translation of Schwärmerei.47 Robert Burton, who despised En­glish Puritans as much as Luther disliked Anabaptists, diagnosed enthusiasm in 1621 as religious melancholy, a psychosomatic disease caused by too much black bile—­the dry, cold, melancholic humor. Its victims, “possessed with blind zeal and misled by superstition,” ­were “pythonissas, sibyls, enthusiasts, pseudoprophets, heretics and schismatics.” Afflicted by “absurd and ridicu­lous, feral and la­men­ta­ble fits,” they suff ered “incredible madness and folly.” God was the object of the deranged love that excited them to “macerate and consume their bodies . . . ​[in] canonical obedience, wilful poverty, vows of chastity, monkery and a solitary life.” Exploiting their asceticism, Satan “strangely



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deludes them, and . . . ​makes them . . . ​­hazard their souls . . . ​[in] immoderate fasting, bad diet [and] sickness.” The Devil also caused them to “hear strange noises, confer with hob­goblins, . . . ​[and] rivel up their bodies.” This was Burton’s diagnosis in his Anatomy of Melancholy.48 With ammunition like this, Henry More defended his own idiosyncratic Chris­tian­ity against enthusiasm, first by attacking the alchemist Thomas Vaughan in the 1650s. More’s world had been turned upside down by civil and religious war. Baptists, Diggers, Fifth Monarchy Men, Puritans, Quakers, Ranters, and other sects multiplied (or ­were thought to multiply) as disorder spread through ­England. Although More had doctrinal objections to ­these agitators, he also feared social and po­liti­cal turmoil. To discredit the sects, he applied Burton’s analy­sis. By attributing allegedly religious phenomena (inspiration, prophecy, visions) to a natu­ral cause—­ physiological dementia—he also aligned himself with the new science. To preserve theism, however, he defended the real­ity of personal spirits—­ God, angels, demons, and ghosts. He called it both ways, in other words, describing enthusiasm as super­natural and diabolical but also as natu­ral and delusional. Quakers saw their own trembling and swooning as postures of sinners before God. More and o ­ thers saw crazy p ­ eople driven mad by demons. In a ­later period, when Hogarth observed Methodists in London through Enlightened spectacles, the Schwärmerei that he depicted (Figure 8) was “credulity, superstition and fanat­i­cism.” 49 Across the Channel in Germany, Pietists unnerved more-­sedate Protestants in the same way. When Philosophy at Court appeared in 1688, Thomasius was already connected with Pietist leaders, including Philipp Spener, whose Pious Desires had been published in 1675. The personal, experiential current in German spirituality—­revived ­earlier by Johann Arndt’s True Chris­tian­ity—­was a menace to institutional religion. And yet Arndt’s book was bought by more Germans than any other publication but the Bible. Spener learned its lessons but toned down the mysticism and stayed closer to conventional Lutheranism—­yet to no avail. The respectable orthodox, with their ce­re­bral doctrines and scholastic sermons, w ­ ere too brittle to accept a s­ imple, emotional religion of the heart. What Spener wanted was to unlock the shackles of dogma and ­free the faithful to enjoy God’s love.50 Luther’s priesthood of all believers became a terror to Lutheran clergy, who also disliked the puritan morality in Pietism. By 1689, while August

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Figure 8. ​“Credulity, Superstition, and Fanat­i­cism,” Hogarth, 1762, detail.

Francke was preaching a de viant gospel in Leipzig, the orthodox w ­ ere ready to stand and fight. Thomasius had already annoyed them by lecturing in German (a first) and founding his Monats-­Gespräche, a vernacular periodical for the general public (another first, locally). Francke, who turned Bible study groups into revivals, told his flock not just to study the Bible but to live by it. Students, townspeople—­even ­women—­mobbed his meetings. ­Women had visions. ­Women ­were seen in the university (also a first). The fever of revival raged through Leipzig.51



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Pietists had a power­ful ally in Thomasius, a journalist and ­lawyer. He helped them with professional ser­vices and supported them as victims of religious prejudice. In 1690, ­after the Saxon authorities shut him down—­ denouncing him as an Anabaptist, a Quaker, and a Pietist Schwärmer—he left Leipzig to help found a new university in Halle. He also refereed fights about Jacob Böhme, the German shoemaker whose theosophy had inflamed Christians all over Eu­rope, and about Pierre Poiret, who started as a Cartesian but ended in Quietist irrationalism. Can a S hoemaker Be a Phi­los­o­ pher? That was the question answered in Böhme’s ­favor by Christian Thomasius in 1693, before publishing a Dissertation on Poiret. Pietists had already or­ga­nized study-­groups in Halle, where Francke arrived in 1692.52 With an establishment of their own to run, some Halle Pietists worried about seditious statements that Thomasius made to defend them. Spooked by their old hero, they made their complaints official in 1694. Thomasius was combative but also lawyerly. In 1701, when his colleagues brought a second grievance against him, he broke completely with the university Pietists. As anti-­dogmatists, they had been his partners in eclecticism, despite being anti-­intellectual. But he came to see them as hypocrites enforcing a n ew dogma and breaking eclectic rules. Warrant for a split came from Paul’s message to the Thessalonians: “Prove all t­ hings, and hold fast what is good.” Thomasius (and ­others) set this scripture passage beside Horace’s verse as another slogan for eclectic philosophizing and religious toleration. All ideas, w ­ hether Böhme’s or Luther’s, had to meet standards of biblical and h ­ uman judgment. In 1713 Pietists w ­ ere still battling Thomasius at Halle but could not stop him from becoming rector for life eight years ­later. This was a rector for whom Böhme’s visions passed the eclectic test—­impartial scrutiny by the light of reason. But the righ­teous professors found Böhme and Poiret beyond the pale. Thomasius complained that his old friends, now respectable, ­were fabricating heresies—­driven by the same dogmatism that made the orthodox despise all Pietists. The Thomasius who wondered if Böhme was a phi­los­o­pher was himself an early Aufklärer who published a pamphlet to ask ­Whether Heresy Is a Crime. He followed this pamphlet with further provocations On the Crime of Magic and On the Origin and Pro­gress of Inquisitorial Proceedings against Witches. This reformer of law, renewer of education, and hammer of witch-­ hunters is the Thomasius of modern memory—­rightly so: he tried to get religion out of politics and the law. But his standing at the time was based

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just as much on the organic mysticism of his essay On the Nature of Spirit. ­These contrary (to us) impulses converged on his association with Budde and ­others who pushed Christian Wolff out of Halle.53 Next to take Thomasius up ­were ‘popu­lar phi­los­o­phers’ who liked his Philosophy at Court for its eclectic practicality. The loudest critic of their facile pragmatism was Friedrich Jacobi, born in 1749. In the half c­ entury that followed, the shaky romance between philosophy and occultism—­ and Pico’s story, with it—­took another turn, as the eccentric Jacobi and recalcitrant Wolffians like J. A. Eberhard defined themselves against Kant’s new critical philosophy. Meanwhile, a n ew identity—­the befuddled syncretist—­was being constructed for Pico. Schwärmerei was not a c ategory custom-­made for the prince’s addled misbehavior; it was an old term of abuse ready for novel applications.54 Popularphilosophie was an option for calmer Protestants ­until Kant—­ eventually—­swamped the competition with his three Critiques a­ fter 1781. Success took time, however, and t­ oward the end of his long c­ areer Kant was also writing extensively about religion, with enthusiasm much on his mind. To clarify his concept of the sublime in aesthetics, he distinguished Enthusiasmus or Begeisterung from Schwärmerei. In the former states, a believer joins the idea of the good with emotions, which agitate the mind in a m omentary delirium (Wahnsinn) as imagination soars beyond the senses in unbounded flight t­ oward the moral good. The experience can be sublime—­aesthetically if not conceptually—­unlike the delusion (Wahnwitz) that insists on sensing what cannot be sensed, God’s super­natural power. This is the psychological and moral disease of Schwärmerei, not the less harmful Enthusiasmus of Kant’s taxonomy of religion. A number of En­glish words have been used for Schwärmerei: ‘dreaming,’ ‘fanat­i­cism,’ ‘fantasy,’ ‘imagination,’ ‘muddleheadedness,’ ‘raving,’ ‘visions,’ and ‘zealotry’—­besides the customary ‘enthusiasm.’ Kant returned to the German term throughout his ­career, always as a p ejorative. In the first Critique, it was one item on a bill to be paid by a bankrupt metaphysics, which only the critical philosophy could make solvent. “Only with criticism,” he declared, “can we cut off the very root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, freethinking, unbelief, enthusiasm (Schwärmerei), superstition, . . . ​idealism and skepticism.” Kant showed right-­thinking Christians their fears while also addressing his fellow phi­los­o­phers: idealism, materialism, skepticism, and other issues



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that he names are still prob­lems of philosophy ­today—­but not enthusiasm. He and other Aufklärer inherited their worries about Schwärmerei from the days when Jansenists, Pietists, Quakers, and Quietists devised eccentric religions of the heart. Some leaders of this revolt—­Arnauld, Böhme, Pascal, Spener—­still attracted attention or provoked revulsion in the Enlightenment, though their hold on eighteenth-­century anx­i­eties was nothing compared to Spinoza’s.55 Among Germans who saw Spinoza’s Tractatus as a reformist manifesto, Pietism was a common bond: many of them experienced Pietist rebirth; some came to regret it; all lived through the religious commotion. Gottfried Arnold was converted by Spener and moved farther ­toward mystical occultism. If h ­ umans live like angels, he thought, they can be reborn in God. Arnold’s mysticism motivated his interest in Spinoza’s pantheism. The phi­los­o­pher’s secularization of the very idea of heresy also explains the appeal of the Tractatus to reformers like him and Thomasius. Arnold’s Non-­Partisan History of Church and Heresy, finished in 1700, set a new standard for the critical study of religion. He claimed that greed, ambition, and hy­poc­risy incited most heresy charges: sincere witnesses of faith proved themselves not by joining a church but by experiencing God. While the orthodox kept mistaking dogma for scripture, Spinoza’s reading of the Bible encouraged Pietists to withdraw from church authority by undermining its biblical basis. Thomasius, allying with Arnold against the thought-­police, called the Non-­Partisan History “the best and most useful book of all, ­after the Bible,” showing how far eclecticism could reach ­toward the edges of Eu­ro­pean opinion. By o rthodox standards, Arnold was a Schwärmer: even Pietists found him repulsive (and vice versa).56 When Budde led Pietist disciples of Thomasius against Wolff in the 1720s, part of the complaint about Wolff was that (a purported) Spinozism attracted Arnold and other radicals to him. During the same period, however, Pietism entered a new phase that was hard to reconcile with any philosophy, even the most generous eclecticism. Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, a f ollower of Francke who studied at Halle, invited pilgrims from Bohemia to s­ ettle on his estate in 1722. They w ­ ere Moravian Brethren, whose Hussite origins had already taken them to the fringes. Within a few years they attracted a striking variety of believers, mainly Pietist, to their utopian community of Herrnhut. Before Zinzendorf died in 1760, the Moravian movement had passed its peak, though it still survives—­like some Swedenborgian churches.

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Andrew Frey, a f armer and preacher from Pennsylvania, joined the Moravians in 1742, traveled to Herrnhut, and wrote down his “experimental knowledge of . . . ​this School of Satan.” The visit was a disaster: Frey cringed when the brethren called themselves “wound-­worms” (maggots) and claimed that they “experienced the blood of Christ and dwell in his side-­hole.” Emotional display was a test that Frey could not pass. Scripture itself was a trap when it became “a certain sign that a ­brother has not yet experienced the Saviour’s grace in his heart if he meditates on the Bible, . . . ​ for anyone having found lodging, bed and board in the Lamb’s wounds cannot but be merry and live according to nature, so that when such a one plays any pranks that the godly ones cry out against them as sins, the Saviour himself . . . ​rejoices the more over the sportive ­little wound-­worms.” Distinctions of demeanor—­more than creed—­made all the diff erence to worshippers whose mawkish devotional language invited rule breaking so that “a spirit of drunkenness and debauchery . . . ​broke loose.” Young ­people especially w ­ ere “wanton, laughing, sporting, jesting, leaping, throwing one another on the floor . . . ​[in] filthy, gross indecencies. . . . ​ ­There was often such an uproar,” according to Frey, “as if a mad-­house had broke loose, . . . ​and ­these orgia . . . ​lasted till one or two in the morning with the most indecent levity, and . . . ​the Saviour’s precious wounds are made a veil for ­these dissolute practices. . . . ​If I off ered to find fault, I was so hooted and railed at that I was obliged to suppress my dislike.” When Frey took his grievances to the top, Count Zinzendorf turned the complaints against the whistle-­blower, “as if it ­were a m ost terrible blasphemy . . . ​to censure the Lamb’s wound-­worms when they so positively rowl themselves in the wounds.” A ­ fter all, it was the Count himself who sparked this cultural revolution, known in Moravian tradition as the ‘sifting time,’ by encouraging his followers to behave mindlessly—­like the ­little ­children that Jesus suff ered to come unto him. Such artless piety charmed few of Zinzendorf’s contemporaries—­least of all Voltaire and the philos­ ere connoisseurs of guile. ophes, who w The Pico ridiculed by Voltaire was a “blind man guided by blind masters.” Assessed in this way, the confusion came from outside its victim: he was misled by bad teachers. But when this indictment entered Pico’s rec­ord in the Age of Enlightenment, it was compounded by a harsher charge of Schwärmerei. The prince’s delusion—­like the delirium of Frey’s “wound-­ worms”—­was a sickness inside, a disease of his own soul. And Kant was ready with a philosophical prescription.57

7

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Liberty, Enthusiasms, and Grace The danger of lapsing into muddleheaded visions is death to all philosophy. —­k a nt

1. ​ Se vuol ballare Signor Contino . . . When Voltaire attacked Pico, the attention paid to the prince was in keeping with his reputation—­though not in a happy way. A c­ entury ­later, however, his fortunes ­were on the rise. Voltaire had mocked him, but Burckhardt made a new halo for him—an aura of ­human dignity. What happened to Pico between 1756, when Voltaire published his Essai sur les moeurs, and 1860, the year of Burckhardt’s very dif­fer­ent Essay on the Re­nais­sance? During this c­ entury, the prince attracted interest at home, in Mirandola, which by then was in the Este lands of the Duchy of Modena.1 On the eve of the French Revolution, the Este dukes w ­ ere attentive to cultural politics. Patronage on display was part of the ­family business, already well established in the Quattrocento and thriving ­under Ercole I, the duke during most of Pico’s life. According to Pico’s nephew, this Ercole “had no small regard” for the prince, whom he outlived by just nine years. A second Ercole—­another benefactor of arts and letters—­died in 1559. The third Ercole was the last of the Italian House of Este. Born in 1727, he waited more than fifty years to govern his duchy, while surviving endless palace turmoil whose motives ­were always the same—­securing the Este succession and expanding the ­family’s territory.2 Ercole starred in this ­family circus. At one time he spoiled the dynasty’s matrimonial plans by romancing a singer. At another he balked at marrying his d ­ aughter to the Archduke of Austria, u ­ ntil a month of h ­ ouse arrest 231

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changed his mind. Nine years l­ater, once he took control, he planned and executed a policy of signorial reform—in the face of re­sis­tance. Agriculture, commerce, justice, taxes, technology, and trade w ­ ere sectors that he tried to modernize. He also reached into religion and education, enlarging the duchy’s collection of books and reviving its ancient university.3 Working in two of the duke’s reformed institutions—­schools and the library—­two of his subjects, Ricardo Bartoli and Girolamo Tiraboschi, told Pico’s story again to Enlightened Italians. Tiraboschi came to Modena in 1770, Bartoli in 1786—­the year when Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro premiered in Vienna. The plot of that comic opera is ­simple in outline: Count Almaviva, deceived by his wife, her maid, his barber, and his barber’s ­mother, tries but fails to enforce feudal claims on the maid. With so many players disguised, switching genders, or hiding b ­ ehind props, complications ensue, u ­ ntil the count begs his wife for forgiveness. The Almaviva court is near Seville, but if Mozart had looked for material in the Duchy of Modena, he would have been disappointed. Duke Ercole took his duties seriously and had trou­bles too messy for the stage. But Count Almaviva’s barber, the cheeky Figaro, was a specter haunting Ercole and all of Eu­rope’s nobility. The commotion in the Almaviva ­family is domestic, to be sure, and fictional: when the count fi­nally repents, theatrical enlightenment is enough to do the trick. Even in the small state of Modena, however. Duke Ercole’s obligations w ­ ere real and—in comparison to Almaviva’s tasks—­overwhelmingly many. In dif­fer­ent ways, Ercole and Almaviva both had cause to worry about Figaro ­because both danced to tunes called by their servants.4 Tiraboschi, one of Ercole’s employees, gave him l­ ittle trou­ble. Like the duke, he was earnest and mildly progressive about his duties, one of which was to aggrandize the House of Este. Another servant, Bartoli, was lower in rank. Both ­were priests, and Bartoli, as a Franciscan, lived by ­those subversive words of Jesus: “Sell that thou hast and give to the poor.” He was also a zealous Catholic who came to think that the one, holy, and apostolic faith could accommodate democracy. How would Ercole, an industrious and well-­meaning duke, deal with this incendiary friar? The Este hired Tiraboschi, a Jesuit at the time, to turn their books, manuscripts, and other holdings into a premier regional collection. The literary products of his ser­vice ­were even more impressive. Just as Brucker had produced the first comprehensive History of Philosophy, Tiraboschi synthesized his own subject forty years l­ater, in 1782, with a History of Italian



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Lit­er­a­ture in thirteen volumes. Before moving to Modena, he had worked in Milan, a city on the move, and a pre­de­ces­sor in Modena was the g­ reat Ludovico Muratori, a prophet of Enlightenment in Italy.5 Muratori, a priest like Tiraboschi and Bartoli, had sided with his Este employers against the papacy in a crucial property dispute. To investigate the contesting claims, he studied old documents and began publishing them in 1717 in a Treatise on Antiquities of the Este and of Italy. Despite his eff orts, the Este lost the dispute, but Eu­rope gained by Muratori’s industry, which led to a larger proj­ect in twenty-­eight volumes: Writers on Italian Topics from the Year 500 of the Christian Era to the Year 1500. This huge undertaking secularized the Eu­ro­pean past by setting standards of reason and evidence apart from religious dogma and ecclesiastical control. While Muratori was denying papal infallibility in temporal aff airs, he also made a discovery insignificant in size—­only two manuscript pages—­that changed the story of Chris­tian­ity itself: experts still call this early evidence about the Gospels the ‘Muratorian fragment.’ The scholar who found this transformative document also engaged in po­liti­cal polemics and wrote disturbing books on doctrinal and devotional questions while barely avoiding the heresy hunters.6 Muratori’s renown was Tiraboschi’s heritage in Modena; but for his own Jesuit order, times ­were bad all over Eu­rope, including Italy. Clement XIV suppressed the Society in 1773. The displaced priest had options, however: he continued to buy books as an agent of the Este court, while also teaching at the University of Modena, recently revived. Work in the library went well, earning him new titles by 1780. As Cavaliere and Consigliere, the Abate Tiraboschi spent less time shelving books, more time writing them—­and writing about Pico. In Este circles Pico was an ancestor who had burnished his heraldry with genius and learning. Tiraboschi delivered the prince’s chapter of Este history to the dukes in three dif­fer­ent packages. The first was a volume on the Quattrocento in his History, where Pico follows Ficino as an advocate of Platonism. Next came the Library of Modena, completed in 1781—­a six-­ volume biographical dictionary of writers born in the duchy, including Mirandola and the Picos who ruled ­there. The last proj­ect—­completed in 1795, a year ­after Tiraboschi died—­supported five volumes of Historical Rec­ords of the Modena Region with dense documentation in Muratori’s manner. Annals of the Pico clan close the fourth volume of Rec­ords, starting with Countess Matilda in medieval Tuscany and continuing u ­ ntil 1747,

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when the “line descended from the heirs of Manfredo went extinct.” The legendary Manfredo’s blood, according to some old stories, ennobled the Ugo to whom the countess gave the original Pico estates.7 ­Because fiefs and feuds w ­ ere Tiraboschi’s business in the Rec­ords, he could spare only a paragraph for the “celebrated Count Giovanni . . . ​who attended only to his studies.” A few sentences ­were enough to sum up property deals in 1491 that left the prince f­ ree “to live for God, letters and his friends.” Readers who wanted more could go to Tiraboschi’s Library of Modena for a f uller biography of Pico, which enlarged the account from the History with more details from Gianfrancesco’s Life. A “cata­log of works” listed collected editions and classified other titles. Besides books “separately printed,” Tiraboschi described manuscripts and texts without “editions of their own: De ente et uno; De hominis dignitate oratio; In psalmum xv commentarius; De Christi regno et vanitate huius mundi.” This list in the Library gave the Oration only a ­little more visibility than it had in the famous History.8 But the History singled out Pico’s era, the Quattrocento, as richer in genius than the periods before or ­after. ­After 1300, in Tiraboschi’s judgment, it took three hundred years to overcome the e­ arlier barbarism, and in the “history of Italian lit­er­a­ture” the fifteenth ­century was the “most celebrated and glorious.” The author used the term letteratura broadly to include philosophy, scholarship, and science as well as arts and letters in their sociopo­liti­cal settings. The Quattrocento’s task was to light up the darkness and wash away the squalor so that “fine arts could rise again (risorgere) . . . ​and return (ritornare) to their ancient perfection.” Tiraboschi’s language of retrograde renewal was artful and insistent: ravvivare, ricercare, richiamare, rivestire—­every­thing but rinascere.9 Agents of this resurgence w ­ ere learned p ­ eople now called ‘humanists’— so called by us, not by Tiraboschi. To investigate autori classici, he explained, ­these eruditi founded academies and talked about “Roman antiquities then being unearthed, the Greek and Latin languages, works by ancient writers and sometimes even a philosophical prob­lem.” Searching the shelves for tattered documents was seductive for a celibate librarian. But the ancient Sirens could be deadly, he feared, especially when their song was “Plato’s mysterious follies” as orchestrated by Ficino. Marsilio and ­others took the Tuscan fashion for Plato so far “that fi­nally it led them to write crazy t­ hings that could not be read without laughing.” Stoking the fires of delusion w ­ ere two large talents—­Ficino and Pico—­but the fever “made all their eff orts useless.”10



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Tiraboschi’s antagonism to a P latonic revival is understandable. His Jesuit schooling was Aristotelian, and Brucker—­who accused Ficino of promoting “fake philosophers”—­was an impor­tant in­for­mant. Although Brucker disliked Pico even more than Ficino, Tiraboschi—­adjusting the rec­ord in ­favor of an Este relation—­disagreed. Once the prince saw Ficino detoured by “fables of Platonic dreamers,” he looked for a straighter path. This “second ornament” of Platonism was the “more admirable” ­because his range was wider and his thinking deeper. Th ­ ere’s ­little more to say about Tiraboschi’s preference for Pico—­stated in a work about literary culture that does not focus on philosophy. The account of Pico in this History is mainly biographical, taken from Gianfrancesco’s Life, and the Oration gets barely a mention.11 On a k ey point, however, Tiraboschi revised Gianfrancesco’s story, where his u ­ ncle’s “mastery of five languages” entered the Pico myth. The librarian found the prince’s fascination with languages not creative but “destructive” ­because Hebrew manuscripts lured him into fraud. Except to repeat the charge that he paid a swindler for counterfeit books of Kabbalah, Tiraboschi said ­little about them, referring instead to “Brucker’s extensive discussion”—­but without warning readers about the excoriation of Pico awaiting them in Brucker’s volumes. For himself, he was sad to see “so happy a t alent applied so diligently yet duped by arguments so frivolous”—­meaning what Pico said in his t­ heses. In the end, the prince’s work was cut short and his genius was “undone by prejudices recklessly ­adopted,” according to Tiraboschi.12 Amiably written, well received, and translated into other Eu­ro­pean languages, the History had no rivals for size and scope—­even without the Historical Rec­ords and Library of Modena to amplify it. ­Until Francesco De Sanctis published a less bulky, ideologically refreshed, yet still comprehensive History of Italian Lit­er­a­ture in 1870, Tiraboschi’s volumes ­were indispensable, and they informed Italians about Pico for nearly a ­century. Compared to Brucker’s assault on the prince, the priest’s admonishments ­were almost kindly, if not suitable for mythmaking. While Tiraboschi was still writing, however, that task was taken up by Ricardo Bartoli, also an Este subject.13 ­Brother Ricardo came from Reggio d’Emilia to Mirandola in 1786 to teach school: he was nearly forty, and the Jesuits w ­ ere gone. Two years l­ater he finished a manual on Latin grammar and spelling that became standard in the duchy. He had already published a pa mphlet on the theology of

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grace, and his literary energy was endless. Two works that made it into print are memorable. One was ἀ e Rights of Man, a Catholic Demo­cratic Catechism. This polemic replied in 1797 to an anonymous Social Catechism or Ele­ments of Morality for Teaching the Young whose lessons looked like deism and materialism to Bartoli. The main point of his Demo­cratic Catechism was that only good religion makes good politics. Jesus was the “perfect demo­crat,” and Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s state of nature was the innocence that Adam lost to sin. This paradise could be regained only by God’s grace, though the Church could cooperate by humbling the mighty—­like Christ defying the “scribes and Pharisees, . . . ​the most insolent and prideful aristocrats of that time.” In 1798, a­ fter Napoleon invaded Italy and Bartoli lost his original teaching post, the friar took off his Franciscan habit, and the bishop of Reggio suspended him from priestly duties: his Jansenist instincts and progressive yearnings made him a target. As his trou­bles went from bad to worse, he was never restored to the classroom and never got the parish he wanted. But he found other work as a military chaplain ­until 1806, when he died “more a gladiator than a monk,” as one commentator remembered him.14 Another critic noted that the friar had “taken it in his head to reconcile French democracy with Catholicism.” Reconciliation was also Pico’s aim—­ philosophical concord, however, not political—­yet Bartoli linked Pico’s proj­ect with his own dreams of liberation in another breathtaking eff ort, his Speech in Praise of Prince Giovanni Pico, Called the Phoenix of Intellects. Talking for ninety minutes or so—­after introductions—­the speaker spoke enough words to take anyone’s breath away. Students of Pico who encounter Bartoli’s Elogio ­today may be surprised to see the longest and most detailed account of their subject published before the late nineteenth ­century. Like Tiraboschi, the friar relied on Gianfrancesco’s Life, but he paid more attention than the librarian to the prince’s writings—­both books and manuscripts—­and he mentioned the Oration twice. He seems to have read the speech, though only as a guide to Pico’s proj­ect in the Conclusions, not as a statement about dignity.15 Addressing boys from schools in and around Mirandola, Bartoli gave his Elogio on November 30, 1789, one day before sailors in the French navy arrested their own admiral. A l­ ittle e­ arlier, the National Assembly had taken over the archbishop’s ­house in Paris. A few weeks ­later, bread riots ­were rattling mirrors in Versailles. For a reformer like Duke Ercole, the news from France was alarming and perplexing. Within a few years, with



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revolution at his front door, he would flee to Venice with the ducal gold and lose it—­before Bartoli declared himself on h ­ uman rights. Meanwhile, during the first moments of the French convulsion, if a f riar from Reggio encouraged ­children of the duchy to emulate an Este ancestor, what harm could be done? ­Brother Ricardo’s intentions seemed good. This “public teacher of lit­ er­a­ture in Mirandola” had been invited to speak at the opening of the school year by the town’s governor, Count Angiolo Scarabelli Manfredi-­ Pedocca. Angiolo was a civil and military engineer from the duke’s entourage who encouraged Bartoli’s literary ambition. The friar assured the count, known to be studious, that “Giovanni, your g­ reat ancestor, is a reflection of yourself.” While flattering a patron (another heir of the lordly Manfredo), Bartoli also selected Pico as a “model worthy of imitation by diligent youth.”16 He waited fourteen months, u ­ ntil 1791, to see his speech in print, ­after several rounds of ecclesiastical scrutiny. But did the censors ever actually read his densely annotated Elogio? Its praises of Pico foreshadowed, without subtlety, the Demo­cratic Catechism of 1797. However—to avoid corrupting the youth overtly and risking his income—­Bartoli divided the text of the speech as delivered (46 pages) from much lengthier “historical critical notes” (136 pages of smaller type) and had them published together (in Guastalla, not Modena). The ­whole book, with preliminaries, fills nearly 200 pages. He gave the speech in two parts—­pausing for an intermission, perhaps.17 Employed by the duchy, still in Franciscan robes and addressing his own students about Pico, Bartoli off ered them a model spoiled by papal condemnation. Before confronting the prince’s disgrace, he recited other illustrious names—­Columbus, Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton—­ranked his hero with ­these luminaries, and hoped that brilliance would outshine bad judgment. Living a­ fter a barbarous era in an age of resurgence—­Tiraboschi’s risorgimento—­Pico had called philosophy out of the shadows to join the pro­cession of Enlightenment as it was forming. The scandal suff ered by him was actually a triumph, according to Bartoli. This oblique victory was a hard sell, however, as the friar realized: he knew about Brucker’s denunciation of Pico as well as Tiraboschi’s gentler reprimand. He could rely on Gianfrancesco’s pious Life but not just as a platform for panegyric: too much sanctimonious fantasy would bore the schoolboys. Accordingly, while reflecting on Pico’s biography and larding

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it with encomium, Bartoli also took time to explain why they should forget the infamy in the story.18 Conspiracy among jealous intellectuals, not infidelity on the prince’s part, provoked the papal condemnation: this was the friar’s reasoning. Although Pico’s “attempted feat gave rise to a sect of magico-­kabbalist phi­ los­o­phers that lasted nearly a ­century, I am not sure,” he observed, “­whether this was harmful to philosophical thinking or, in the long run, stirred it up.” Bartoli appraised the ­whole catastrophe, in Jansenist tones, as proof of “weakness in the h ­ uman heart.” And yet Pico prevailed b ­ ecause he was “illuminated by light from on high. Content to confound his rivals with testimonies of pure faith and doctrine, he dedicated himself wholly to God and the Church’s welfare. What­ever ­others may say, he gave no further thought to Kabbalah except insofar as he believed it could help refute Jewish treachery. Moreover, in his famous work against judicial astrology, he presented the world with an ironclad demonstration of his reverent revulsion at all the relics of superstition.”19 Even when Pico was younger, looking deeply into “Platonic, Pythagorean, Hermetic, and Kabbalist mysteries while . . . ​fearlessly inspecting the horrid visage of necromancy,” his purpose was far-­sighted and noble—to deprive magic of power over nature. Although the ancient wisdom that he revived was fragmentary and some of his own writing was inscrutable, it was also profound—­t hough he had ­l ittle time to put his thoughts in order. In the end, despite an early death, this “creative spirit” and “tireless hero” triumphed by securing the ­f uture for truth and freedom.20 ­After this euphoric finale, the second part of Bartoli’s Elogio may have fallen flat—­a litany of Pico’s virtues tracking Gianfrancesco’s narrative. Mirandola’s sons ­were urged, as citizens of this prince’s city, to sanctify their hero’s name by letting his self-­denial and otherworldliness guide them to heaven. The occasion required such sentiments at the close of the speech, but the final citation in its first part was a bonus. The following passage from Bartoli’s source includes the words quoted by the friar and a few more: “Time has destroyed the opinions of Descartes, but his glory endures. He is like t­ hose dethroned kings who, among ruins of empire, impress ­people as having been born to command. As long as philosophy and truth exist on earth, they w ­ ill honor someone who has provided a basis for knowledge. . . . ​At the foot of Newton’s statue we should sing praises for Descartes—or rather it should be for Newton to praise



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Descartes.” Published in 1765 by the French Acad­emy, this Éloge of Descartes by Antoine Thomas inspired Bartoli’s Elogio. But the friar’s passing reference to Thomas would have escaped the schoolboys. He identified the “­g reat orator from France” only in his notes, where he also had more to say about the “path ­toward improvement” that Pico and Descartes both walked.21 Thomas and the philosophes realized that Newton—an En­glish associate of their own Académie—­had made Cartesian physics obsolete. But a related achievement, the de­mo­li­tion of scholastic metaphysics by Descartes, was an enduring blow for liberté, proclaimed by Thomas as a French ideal. Also for young Italians, according to Bartoli’s notes, “Pico’s story is strongly analogous to the story of the ­great Descartes.” Even though the French phi­los­o­pher’s system of particles swirling through the cosmos had been abandoned, it was a physical theory that freed science from metaphysics. The vortices devised by Descartes but discarded by Enlightened Cartesians, according to Bartoli, ­were like the magic and Kabbalah that Pico once promoted but l­ater abandoned. Just as Descartes liberated science from scholastic conundrums with implausible cosmic whirl­pools, Pico exhumed “skele­tons of philosophy” and preserved them in his Conclusions to convince ­later generations—if only by counterexample—­that some truths r­ eally had no ancient sources at all. Pro­gress was the child of error in Bartoli’s ingenious rehabilitation of the prince.22 Bartoli’s reconditioned Pico, just like Descartes, was a c hampion of reform and a precursor of Enlightenment: the friar said so briefly in his spoken address. Then he repeated this claim at length in his printed notes. Critics ­were wrong, he insisted, to write the prince off as an antiquarian mystery-­monger and erratic adolescent. His ­grand proj­ect was a N ew Acad­emy whose aim was Catholic unity: “one Divinity alone, one faith alone, one truth alone.” But the prospect of unity terrified the prince’s rivals—­squabbling scholastics who denied the plain facts of his conduct: docility, humility, moderation, modesty, and piety. Attacking the 900 Conclusions, his opponents made false charges that Brucker would use l­ater to indict Pico for chaotic syncretism.23 In fact, his procedure was eclectic, so Bartoli claimed: “He had the good sense to make choices.” While challenging the charge of syncretism made by Brucker and restated by Tiraboschi, the friar found a way to keep peace with the eminent librarian. Almost all the prince’s propositions w ­ ere to be eliminated by debate, he pointed out, so that just a few princi­ples would

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remain to define his New Acad­emy. Hence, from so many obscure precepts came rays of light—­“modern philosophy dawning and resurgent”—as Pico banished occult qualities and repudiated scholastic hypotheses. He took modern positions in metaphysics, psy­chol­ogy, and even physics, “talking like a real Newtonian about the theory of light and color.” Some of his Kabbalah was useful too—to be used against Jews.24 Bartoli told his audience (and explained to his readers) that Pico was a hero of science and freedom. Maybe they believed him. If they w ­ ere per­ ecause that suaded, it was nothing about dignità that convinced them, b idea was no part of the friar’s case—as it soon would be for Wilhelm Tennemann. Bartoli came from the generation before Tennemann but wrote about Pico in the same climate of Enlightenment during the first months of revolution. He took no more notice of the Oration than Tiraboschi, however, who was still more Jesuit than Jacobin. And Bartoli made Pico a shining example of liberty and pro­gress without giving a thought to dignity.25 For many years, many Italians—­students of Tiraboschi’s subject or not—­read the faint damns that Pico drew from him, while almost no one noticed Bartoli’s emphatic praises, despite their extent and intensity. Local historians (like Felice Ceretti in Mirandola) who came across Bartoli smothered him ­under avalanches of facts—­thoroughly forgettable ­until sorted, analyzed, and summarized. In a larger province of Italian culture, where Tiraboschi eventually yielded to De Sanctis, the prevailing verdict on Pico for nearly a ­century was Tiraboschi’s—­negative, but not vicious like Voltaire’s, nor hysterical like Brucker’s, but still sizing the prince up as a gullible lightweight.26 For judges harsher than Tiraboschi, criteria unfriendly to f­ ree spirits like Pico had long been in play. Enthusiasm, Schwärmerei, and related notions ­were weapons of religious polemic before the Enlightenment. But it was Kant, philosophizing for his own Age of Criticism, who made ­those slurs eff ective long a­ fter his death. Although he barely noticed Pico in his own writings, Kant established and promoted norms that, for his many followers, banished the prince from philosophy u ­ ntil ­after World War I. On the other hand—­and in the same framework of systematic philosophy—he constructed the theory of dignity that restored Pico’s reputation and made him a celebrity a­ fter World War II. Had Bartoli’s Elogio attracted more attention, the prince’s ­later admirers might have seen him as a Cartesian liberator, not a Kantian moralist:



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Bartoli’s misunderstanding had few backers, however. When he followed up his Elogio in 1794 with a L atin Address on Gianfrancesco Pico, a reviewer dismissed it as a “tissue of vague judgments and generic reflections”: the critic was F ­ ather Pompilio Pozzetti, Tiraboschi’s successor in Modena. Giovanni Pico’s fame endured in the duchy, however, where Bartoli was a prophet without honor who died elsewhere.27

2. ​Philosophy ­Dying In one way, by giving the modern world its conception of dignity, Kant succeeded in helping the prince where Bartoli failed. This innovation in moral philosophy rescued Pico—­eventually—­from damage inflicted during the Enlightenment. But by theorizing about religious delusion, Kant also gave reasons to agree with Voltaire and Brucker that the prince’s “alarming lunacy” led to “philosophy’s corruption.”28 Kant compared his own achievement in philosophy to the Copernican revolution in astronomy, seeing both as cosmic shifts of perspective. To justify the boast, he had to change philosophy in an epochal way. Events on such a scale had transformed history before, of course, upsetting h ­ uman aff airs and sometimes improving them. But some p ­ eople wanted something even more difficult than a revolution—­a rebirth—­the type of rebirth that needs a miracle.29 A spirit reborn—­the Wiedergeburt sought by some Pietists—­would not be a biological renewal or a cultural re­nais­sance, like the one where Pico now presides. Yet all t­ hese notions express the same hope: that something dead (a man, a culture, a god) can live again. If the hope defied reason, phi­ los­o­phers could ignore it, though some of them had neglected reason and even opposed it. Critics from William of Ockham and Meister Eckhart (condemned by the same pope) through Luther and Jacob Böhme spotted flaws in the faculty of reason, as Kant did too. In this regard, his most radical pre­de­ces­sor, whose upbringing was also Pietist, was Johann Georg Hamann, who lived u ­ ntil 1788. Known as the ‘Magus of the North,’ Hamann stirred up a c ounter-­ enlightenment in Germany. He called Aufklärung into question by defying its first commandment, the rule of reason. In 1758 he found his life in ruins, financially and morally. A mystical experience sent him for guidance to the unlikely duo of David Hume and the Bible. He was not the first to leap from skepticism to fideism, but ­doing so on Hume’s advice suggests

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e­ ither subtle irony or none at all. For thirty years ­after his conversion, the point that he pressed on the Aufklärer—­including Kant—­was that reason misses the point. To find meaning in life, one must look to the Bible and the other books that God wrote—­texts of nature and humanity. P ­ eople and ­things in the world, according to Hamann, are signs in a divine code that reason w ­ ill never crack. ­After his illumination, Hamann’s Schwärmerei alarmed a patron, who enlisted Kant in a v ain eff ort to restrain the new enthusiast. Instead, Hamann put out another book in 1759, Socratic and Noteworthy, turning Socrates into a prophet of Christian faith—­not the dialectical Socrates but the pious questioner who professed ignorance and listened to his demon when reason failed him. In place of the rational faculty, Hamann’s Socrates promoted intuitive sensibility. Yet another pronouncement, Aesthetics in a N utshell: A R hapsody in Kabbalistic Prose, appealed even more to artists and poets of the Sturm und Drang. If God’s cosmic presence requires ­humans to decipher the world, his personal presence in them invites artists to express the divine in transports of genius—­like the urgings of a S ocratic demon. Although Hamann played a pivotal role in German cultural life, such opinions distanced him from Kant. And then came the first Critique in 1781. Hamann finished a Metakritik in 1784 but withheld it from the press. His book attacked the “purism of reason” and—as the title indicates—­a lso questioned another key attitude of Enlightenment, the stance that Kant called ‘critical.’30 Hamann was one of the few who took notice of Kant’s masterpiece when it first appeared. A year a­ fter Hamann answered it, Friedrich Jacobi made a sensational accusation that would stir up more interest in Kant’s new system: he called Gotthold Lessing a Spinozist. The charge shocked the German literati: Lessing was a beacon of pro­gress for the same Aufklärer who treated Spinoza (in Lessing’s words) like a “dead dog.” In fact, as early as the 1750s the loose conception of pantheism that had attracted Gottfried Arnold and other Pietists to Spinoza also interested Lessing as well as Moses Mendelssohn. But Mendelssohn soon changed his mind and moved on to a rationalist metaphysics better suited to conventional religion, while his collaborator Lessing built an enormous reputation in aesthetics, criticism, drama, philosophy, and religion. Although Lessing sympathized with the Moravians as victims of dogmatism, their lack of rigor annoyed him. But his Anti-­Goeze of 1778 was



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a polemic against dogmatists. Its title immortalized a L utheran pastor who had objected to Lessing’s publication of controversial material on the historical Jesus and natu­ral (not revealed) religion by Hermann Reimarus, another admirer of Spinoza’s Tractatus. Although Lessing criticized Reimarus and took a safer position, he concluded that reason rather than revelation should guide religious belief—­a brave declaration of nonconformity.31 In the meantime, Jacobi had grown up in the hot­house of Moravian Pietism, which prepared him to take a philosophical position as radical as Hamann’s views on religion. His key insight—­not a mystical breakthrough like Hamann’s—­was philosophical. A ­ fter reading an early work by Kant on the ontological argument for God’s existence, he found the proof correct, but only when applied to Spinoza’s pantheist and heretical God. From then on, Jacobi maintained that Spinozism or some other heresy lies at the end of any rational philosophy. ‘Nihilism’ was the name he gave to the wreckage that reason always produces. If conventional philosophy always led to atheism, fatalism, and materialism, as Jacobi feared, one alternative was skepticism—­believing nothing at all. Faced with a choice between reason and skepticism or faith and irrationalism, Jacobi chose the latter. He called Lessing a Spinozist to make the point that even the most refined use of reason ­will end badly. An unintended eff ect of his charge was that respectable German intellectuals, for the first time, took Spinoza’s pantheism seriously. A second result, quite deliberate, was to force Mendelssohn to rebut what Jacobi said about Lessing, both as Lessing’s friend and as a trustee of reason.32 On the second point, Mendelssohn argued that Lessing’s ironies about Spinoza w ­ ere too subtle for a Schwärmer like Jacobi to grasp. But Mendelssohn’s Morning Lessons left the first prob­lem unsolved: ­there was still no way to defeat pantheism. At this moment, four years ­after publication, Kant’s first Critique had still not found much of an audience, as the ‘pantheism ­battle’—­with Jacobi and Mendelssohn at its center—­stirred ­things up again. The crisis became scandalous when Mendelssohn died in 1786 and his friends blamed Jacobi for causing the stress that killed him. In the same year, Karl Reinhold published the first of the Letters that fi­nally made Kant famous. A m ajor attraction of the critical philosophy was that it found a way for reason—­not theoretical but practical reason—to support religious belief. For Reinhold and other converts to the critical philosophy, Kant opened a path between skepticism and Schwärmerei.

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This ­m iddle way was hard to find, and Mendelssohn looked for it by ‘orienting’—­iterating or oscillating between intuitions that move ­toward faith and arguments that lead away from it. He suggested that two types of reason, intuitive and discursive, could sustain both common sense and theoretical speculation, with the road to truth and faith lying in between. By c hecking one against the other, philosophy orients itself correctly. Although the argument was circular b ­ ecause Mendelssohn made reason the criterion of reason, his name ensured that p ­ eople would 33 notice. Kant entered the debate in 1786 with “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” Both Mendelssohn and Jacobi, he charged, had encouraged Schwärmerei by confusing reason with knowledge—­pantomime knowledge based on common sense in Mendelssohn’s case, on irrational inspiration in Jacobi’s. Kant’s solution treated reason as practical rather than theoretical, not describing the undescribable but prescribing an ideal— in religious m ­ atters, the ideal of righ­teous conduct. By putting their hollow knowledge ahead of reason, Jacobi deliberately and Mendelssohn inadvertently undermined it. “Who would have thought,” Kant asked, “that even common healthy reason, given the ambiguity in which Mendelssohn . . . ​ left . . . ​this faculty in contrast to speculation, would also . . . ​serve as a princi­ple of enthusiasm (Schwärmerei) in the complete dethroning of reason? And yet this happened in the controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi.” Kant granted that “Mendelssohn prob­ably did not realize . . . ​that arguing dogmatically with pure reason in the field of the supersensible leads ­ ecause he had directly to philosophical enthusiasm (Schwärmerei).” But b failed to make it clear that “reason has the right to speak first . . . ​about supersensible objects such as God,” he opened “the door wide to all enthusiasm (Schwärmerei), superstition and even atheism.” While criticizing Mendelssohn, Kant defended freedom of thought, though not the false freedom that liberates reason from the “laws it gives to itself.” Ruin awaits the f­ ree flight of genius (extolled by Hamann and Jacobi) when “its maxim is that reason’s superior lawgiving is invalid: we ordinary h ­ uman beings call this enthusiasm (Schwärmerei), while t­ hose graced with a k indly nature call it illumination.”34 Another target for Kant was Thomas Wizenmann, a f riend of Jacobi. Insulted to be called a Schwärmer by Kant, Wizenmann accused Kant of the same deviancy: the hurtful word was elastic. Kant had used it in



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Dreams of a Spirit-­Seer to attack both the cosmopolitan Emanuel Swedenborg and a rustic ‘goat-­prophet’ who agitated the phi­los­o­pher’s hometown of Königsberg. Swedenborg was known for speaking with ghosts and angels, and Kant objected that the “realm of shades is the paradise of fantasists, . . . ​hypochondriac exhalations, old wives’ tales and monastery miracles.” The chapter of his Dreams titled “Anti-­Cabbala” aims “to cancel community with the spirit-­world” and warns against “mysteries in the fevered brains of deluded enthusiasts (Schwärmer).” Kant’s philosophical point was that metaphysics without limits goes off the rails.35 Throughout his ­career, especially in his ­later years when he turned from metaphysics and moral philosophy ­toward anthropology and religion, Kant wrote about Schwärmerei and identified its cause as blindness to bound­aries—­violating borders between freedom and nature, reason and other faculties, pure and practical reason, and also pure reason constrained and unconstrained. Among off shoots of this root error, he observed, religious delusion troubled few p ­ eople, and they usually recovered, whereas moral Schwärmerei—­“overstepping the bounds that practical reason sets”—­was widespread.36 He classified its symptoms psychologically. Many t­ hings could go wrong by ­going too far: emotion and communication; imagination and inspiration; introspection, sensation, and perception; reason and judgment—­with or without regard to deep princi­ples like causality or teleology.37 Genius itself sometimes went bad, even common sense, self-­awareness, and self-­ control.38 Some of the results—­like dogmatism, empiricism, naturalism, and supernaturalism—­were habits of bad thinking in general.39 ­Others ­were faults of religion in par­tic­u­lar: atheism, chiliasm, illuminism, indifferentism, libertinism, mysticism, superstition, and unbelief.40 Sins against reason and its self-­constructed limits corrupted aesthetics, ethics, and politics, not just spirituality and theology.41 Besides Hamann, Jacobi, Swedenborg, and other contemporaries, Kant singled out Pascal, Plato, Guillaume Postel, and other visionaries of the past as Schwärmer. ­ ental Their disorder was “raving rationally (mit Vernunft zu rasen),” a m illness that could also be physical, like melancholy or hypochondria. Ascetics, poets, and prophets ­were prey to the condition, and Schwärmerei was a nastier label for it than Enthusiasmus.42 In 1798, in ἀ e Conflict of the Faculties, Kant tried to ­settle a controversy that he had provoked five years before by publishing Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, which caused the Prus­sian government to censure him.

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To defend philosophical freedom against theologians (and the State), he illustrated Schwärmerei with Postel’s eccentric view about needing a female savior—an example of the “logical raving that p ­ eople can fall into if they transform the perceptible rendering of a pure idea of reason into the repre­ sen­ta­tion of an object of the senses.” Religion m ­ istakes a subjective item for an objective one by trying to account extra-­subjectively for a subject’s feeling of super­natural influence—­a well-­attested but befuddling experience. Philipp Spener’s Pietism and Count Zinzendorf’s made opposite recommendations—­pessimist and optimist—­for ­handling such feelings. Like Hamann, both prayed for miracles, interventions by God in the natu­ ral order, and both promised “moral metamorphosis . . . ​by super­natural influence.” According to Kant, however, the presumption of having any such feeling as God’s unmediated influence is self-­contradictory ­because the idea of God lies purely in reason. . . . ​But then we still have to ask ­whether another princi­ple for solving Spener’s prob­lem lies in the Bible, . . . ​namely, that t­ here is something in us that can never stop amazing us . . . ​and raises humanity . . . ​to a dignity (Würde) we should never have ­imagined in mankind as an object of experience. . . . ​Most astonishing is our ability to sacrifice our sensuous nature to morality so that we can do what we . . . ​­ought to do—­ this superiority in us of the supersensible man over the sensible. . . . ​ Since the supersensible in us is inconceivable and yet practical, we can well excuse t­ hose who are led to consider it super­natural, . . . ​even though they are quite wrong. . . . ​Even the Bible seems to have in mind . . . ​not super­natural experiences and rapturous (schwärmerische) feelings instead of reason, . . . ​but the spirit of Christ manifested in teaching and example. . . . ​And so, between soulless orthodoxy and the mysticism that kills reason, lies . . . ​true religious doctrine based on the criticism of practical reason.

Schwärmerei is a ­mistake that religious ­people make about a v ariety of feelings—­including the conviction of ­human dignity, which is not a miracle of divine intervention but a w on­der of reason made practical by criticism.43 Kant made the same point in a s horter work of 1796, “On a C ondescending Tone Recently Raised in Philosophy,” where he argued for ethical religion grounded in practical reason as opposed to a religion of feeling. Philosophy promotes religious m ­ istakes when it turns esoteric—­purveying



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the secrets of ascetics, alchemists, freemasons, and mystics who think themselves too good for practical work ­because they take their insights without eff ort from oracles. Even Plato encouraged this perverse philosophizing by teaching that we have access to ideas in God’s mind. B ­ ecause he taught the “au­then­tic philosophy (philosophia arcani) where poetic talent feeds on raving (schwärmen) with feeling and plea­sure,” Plato was “the ­father of all Schwärmerei in philosophy.” Although phi­los­o­phers and enthusiasts both hear the moral law speaking inside them, only Schwärmer take the fateful step of “personifying that law and, in an aesthetic way, making a veiled Isis out of the reason that rules morally. . . . ​One can certainly make use of this l­ater on when first princi­ples have been purified, . . . ​yet always with the danger of lapsing into muddleheaded (schwärmerische) visions, which is death to all philosophy.” Schwärmerei kills philosophy: this was Kant’s verdict on the defect of mind, body, and character that a new Kantian history of philosophy would find in Pico.44

3. ​The Soul Has Wings “Two t­ hings fill the heart with increasing won­der and awe that is always new,” in Kant’s stirring words, “the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.” Although he accepted Newton’s science of heaven and earth as basic, he also thought that a de terminist world-­system would eliminate the freedom required by morality. His remedy opposed noumenal freedom to phenomenal nature in a ­grand theory of cognition and ethics. Some of the eclectics that Brucker admired trusted pure reason; o ­ thers insisted on empirical knowledge. Kant concluded that neither rationalists nor empiricists respected obligatory constraints on thinking. “All acts of a rational being,” he explained, “insofar as they are appearances, . . . ​come ­under natu­ral necessity; but the very same acts, considering only the rational subject with its ability to act purely according to reason, are ­free.” Kant’s response to the prob­lem of nature and freedom has kept phi­los­o­ phers busy ever since. An embodied person constrained by phenomena is also morally ­free as a rational agent, able to recognize an “invisible self, a personality of one’s own . . . ​in a world that has real infinity.” Judging the universe and themselves from t­ hese dif­fer­ent perspectives—­phenomenal and noumenal—­ people have behaved in dif­fer­ent ways. The silence of infinite space terrified

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Pascal, who felt his puny mortality trembling at nature’s immensity. But less acute experiences of nature have had worse results than fearing the night sky, by Kant’s reckoning: “Thinking about the universe started from the most glorious sight ever shown to h ­ uman senses, . . . ​but it ended in astrology.” As moral agents, nonetheless, ­people are “in­de­pen­dent of . . . ​ the w ­ hole world of sense.” 45 In the exercise of practical reason, however, this “noblest trait of h ­ uman nature” has often succumbed to “delusion (Schwärmerei) or . . . ​superstition.” Empiricism has done even more harm, being “more dangerous than any delirium (Schwärmerei)” ­because it promotes “inclinations that . . . ​ degrade humanity when they are raised to the dignity (Würde) of a supreme practical princi­ple.” Yet inclinations can be overcome ­because reason “in the consciousness of its dignity (Würde) despises such motives.” The moral law sees beyond apparent (phenomenal) advantage to the “idea of the dignity (Würde) of a rational being that obeys no law except the one that it gives itself.” The high standing of this self-­legislated autonomy—­“the ground of the dignity (Würde) of ­human nature”—­follows from Kant’s distinction, previously discussed, between price (Preis) and dignity (Würde) as types of value (Wert).46 His analy­sis deserves the attention of anyone who looks for dignity in Pico’s Oration. Autonomy, duty, personhood, rationality, the force of the moral law, moral agency in a Kingdom of Ends, and distinctions among value, price, and dignity: t­ hese are ele­ments of claims about inner worth, pure motives, and disinterested be­hav­ior. Kant summarized ­these lessons by preaching about conduct: “Be no man’s lackey. . . . ​Make no debt without giving full security. . . . ​Accept no ­favors you could do without, and do not be a freeloader, a flatterer or . . . ​a beggar. Be thrifty, then. . . . ​Wailing and whining . . . ​is unworthy of you. . . . ​Kneeling or getting down on the ground . . . ​goes against the dignity of humanity (Menschenwürde).” Kant was not at his best ­here—­a Polonius recovering from Pietism. But the sermon was well grounded, based on a s ystem that synthesized the ­whole Enlightenment encyclopedia. In Königsberg he was just as thorough in the classroom: ­after teaching anthropology twenty-­four times, he published Anthropology from a Practical Point of View in 1798. The book contains his joke about Pico and the camels—in a lecture meant for a general audience. Some students may have known the backstory, Gianfrancesco’s tale of a boy who “learned so very rapidly . . . ​that once he heard any verses recited, he would astonish every­one by repeating them both forward and



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backward, and then he would store them in his unfailingly retentive memory.” 47 Gianfrancesco also said that his ­uncle was generous to the poor and “gave alms from his own body,” meaning that he punished it, unlike many who “have held a hand out to the needy . . . ​but ­were defeated by plea­sure and lures of the flesh. But my u ­ ncle beat his own flesh, especially on t­ hose days that mark Christ’s suff ering . . . ​, to commemorate that best of all good deeds and atone for his sins: I have often seen the lash with my own eyes, and may it all be for the glory of God!” Kant would have endorsed the giving as a duty of justice—­not penitence, however: gifts to the poor restore what we take from them by condoning the world’s injustice. On the other hand, by making the rich richer in reputation, charity sustains inequalities that destroy dignity. The resulting “din of the world” is oppressive. Growing tired of it and withdrawing is noble, but “cloisters and graves to entomb living saints are clownish. Subduing one’s passions with princi­ples is sublime. Mortifications, vows, and other such monkish virtues are clownish.” Yet such a regimen suits an Oration addressed to pilgrims “in the body’s lonely wilderness.” “The soul has wings,” Pico declared, “and when her wings drop off , the soul falls headlong into the body, but she flies back to the gods when they grow again.” By “scorning fortune’s goods,” “unaware” and “careless of the body’s welfare,” we can get new wings and escape “to the mind’s sanctuary.” Other­wise, “the lure of the body hangs like a noose round the soul’s neck.” “The soul is entombed in the body”: in his sonnets Pico repeated this commonplace of the asceticism that pervades the Oration. If the speech had been about the dignity of man, Pico could have praised the body along with the soul—as Gianozzo Manetti did in his treatise on ­human excellence. The body was “wonderfully and superbly fashioned by Almighty God,” Manetti wrote, “so ­great, so worthy (dignus) and so superior a dwelling for the h ­ uman soul.” But in Pico’s Oration, the body is what the soul must flee, and it has no value at all.48 Kant disliked penances that torture the body. But asceticism in general? He talked about sex awkwardly, and he thought of a good meal as a prop for social theater. Sometimes he discussed dignity as if embodiment w ­ ere not relevant: “A h ­ uman treated as a person . . . ​is exalted above any price; for as such (homo noumenon) he is to be valued not simply as a means to ends of o ­ thers or even to his own ends, but as an end in itself, meaning that he possesses a d ignity (Würde)—an absolute inner worth—by which he

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demands re­spect for himself from all other rational creatures.” Is t­ here anything bodily about this inner dignity? Is it any more corporeal or less disembodied than any number of internalities—­conscience, consciousness, grace, inner light, mind, soul—­ascribed to ­humans by the metaphysical and theological overreaching that Kant wanted to block? What made the body relevant was the critical proj­ect itself—­sticking with what science can do in order to find the conditions that make knowledge pos­si­ble. For the creatures that God made, in the world as God created it, ­these conditions are inevitably spatiotemporal. ­There is no world known to us—­nor is ­there any us in that world—­that is not bodily in some way. This is why “wanting to perceive heavenly influences as such is a kind of delirium (Wahnsinn). . . . ​To believe that eff ects of grace are pos­si­ble . . . ​ is all that we can say.” For what we can know—­not just pray for or have faith in—we have nothing to bring ­under concepts except phenomena.49 Does any traffic move between dignity inside and the body outside? Kant’s answer in the Anthropology is hard to pin down: the terminology is vague and finicky, and the evidence is quirky. He observed that office workers leaving small towns for big cities had facial expressions too rigid to communicate up and down in their new jobs, while t­ hose who put on dif­fer­ent ­faces might lose in the exchange. Anecdotal reports of such ­things suggested that physiognomy—­obsolete and unscientific though it was—­ might be on to something. The Spanish w ­ ere said to look grave and solemn, and “the peasant shows awareness of his own dignity (Würde) even in the presence of superiors.” ­Faces express emotion: displayed with its own special feelings, one person’s character diff ers visibly from another’s. But physical character is not moral character. Moral character—­the mark of “a rational creature endowed with freedom”—­belongs as much to a Spanish peasant as a Spanish grandee: both express all the dignity that comes with moral capacity and makes ­humans unlike other creatures. Physical character, on the other hand, belongs to a “being of nature, a creature that can be sensed.” When such a person appears to express dignity, what character is being seen? Dignity and the body lie on opposite sides of a d ivide: bodies line up with nature, laws of nature, phenomena, sensibility, and intuitions; dignity aligns with freedom, the moral law, noumena, reason, and concepts. Yet some embodied ­things look dignified, ­others undignified. We reason about dignity, but we also see it in vis­i­ble ­things. Is dignity embodied in the ­human person? Or in a picture of a person—­like Michelangelo’s Adam? If



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so, and if ­human bodies can never be without their dignity, what­ever the appearances, ­there was good reason for Pico not to have railed against bodies—­had he been concerned with ­human dignity.50 The prob­lem was not ­simple. A m emorable try at solving it came in 1793, during Kant’s lifetime, from Friedrich Schiller, writing On Grace and Dignity to address questions not answered by the Critique of the Power to Judge, Kant’s main work on aesthetics. Schiller made his proposals in fugitive, fragmentary writings that rec­ord formative phases of a d istinctly modern humanism—­a secular, organic humanism absolutely incompatible with Pico’s Oration.51 ‘Aesthetic’ is Kant’s term for the study of sensibility, a passive faculty whose form (not content) is given a priori by the ­human capacity to have intuitions of space and time. The first two Critiques examine judgments of pure and practical reason. The third Critique—­where Kant’s intentions are still unclear to the experts—­deals with aesthetic judgments about nature and art. Empirical and a p riori judgments that can be true or false are unlike aesthetic judgments made correctly (in good taste) or incorrectly (in bad taste): ‘aesthetics’ eventually became a label for theories of taste and beauty. Judgments of taste are subjective, informed by the subject’s response to objects that evoke feelings of beauty or the sublime in the subject. The recalcitrant subjectivity of aesthetic judgment was Schiller’s prob­lem. Kant had classified beauty as ­either ­free or adherent: when we hear beauty f­ ree in m ­ usic, no questions arise about purpose; adherent beauty, by contrast, belongs with buildings, paintings, statues, h ­ uman bodies, and many other t­ hings that have purposes. ­Free beauty is pure—­purposiveness without purpose: m ­ usic can be well designed without achieving anything except itself. Aesthetic judgments follow subjective standards of plea­sure or dis­plea­ sure detached from any object’s existence. Concerns about existence aff ect nonaesthetic plea­sure in the agreeable, as distinct from the beautiful. Mary likes choco­late and seeks it but dislikes raspberries and shuns them: for the seeking to find an agreeable object or the shunning to avoid what is disagreeable, existence is germane for the items on Mary’s menu. But when plea­sure is agreeable, beauty or its absence are not the main issues—­nor is the aesthetic judgment that decides which is the case. Some pleasures necessarily involve existence: c­ hildren love parents, enjoy their presence, and miss them when ­they’re gone. But feeling plea­sure by feeling beauty—­ imagining a pa inting not yet painted, for example—­requires nothing to

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exist but the subject. Moreover, this f­ ree plea­sure in beauty is universal, unlike experiences of agreeable pleasures, which are not only subjective but par­tic­u­lar. Not even ­free plea­sure is objective, however, in the way of rational judgments about concepts: Kant says that the universality of ­free plea­sure is subjective. Aesthetic pleasures can be shared, nonetheless, and plea­sure in beauty aims at the universal. Likewise, judgments about beauty try to understand, but they fall short of understanding b ­ ecause aesthetic judgments bring nothing u ­ nder concepts. The resulting “­free play” of understanding and imagination increases plea­sure, but the feeling of beauty itself is never ­really understood, and responses vary. Aesthetic judgments never achieve the closure of concepts, yet they rely on understanding.52 Beauty calms us, whereas the sublime frustrates and excites: both—­ despite their names and their universal character—­are responses by subjects, not features of objects. We experience phenomena—­a starry sky, a violent storm—­“whose intuition carries with it the idea of their infinity.” This idea frustrates understanding b ­ ecause it is “­great beyond any mea­sure of sense . . . ​and allows not so much an object as a state of mind . . . ​to be judged sublime.” The result is incomparable: t­ here is nothing like it in any par­tic­u­lar object of sensibility. Imagining nature’s awful might brings “amazement bordering on shock,” while the same imagination has “the power to declare our in­de­pen­dence against nature’s influences.” Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes. . . . Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once that make ingrateful man!

The storm passes, eventually, and Lear’s raging brings catharsis. ­Because nature cannot annihilate his moral value or ours, the puniness we both feel is not absolutely terminal: this is Pascal’s thinking reed, gaining by knowing its own flimsiness.53 Schiller’s dignity in relation to grace is like Kant’s sublime in relation to beauty—­more or less. Another insight from the third Critique helps explain Schiller’s discontent with the critical aesthetics, which puts beautiful forms in a h ierarchy and the embodied h ­ uman form at its summit. When the h ­ uman body makes something unbodily manifest—­notably the moral autonomy of dignity and freedom—­“the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.” A symbol gives a sensory experience of what cannot be



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sensed, u ­ nder this constraint: the symbol—an aesthetic idea—is inexponible, not statable as a concept, just as an idea of reason is inostensible, not showable like bodies that carry sensory information which we can cognize. But feelings of bodily beauty symbolize the inostensible even as we experience the impossibility of bringing the aesthetic u ­ nder a c oncept. Such feelings are symbols that evoke the moral order within.54 Kant’s analy­sis, despite its reach, left Schiller wanting more. He needed a better bridge between nature and freedom than symbolism, and he searched for an objective aesthetics that could account for the past of art—­ not just pre­sent experience—­like the Greek statues studied by Johann Winckelmann. Schiller’s Kallias Letters, where beauty is “freedom in appearance,” break with Kant by locating such appearances in objects like statues—­even without anyone looking at them. On Grace and Dignity pre­sents two types of appearance as expressions of freedom—­structural beauty, which is mute; and moving, speaking beauty. Structural or architectonic beauty is static, fixed in an object, whereas speaking beauty is active in two ways. Beauty speaking as grace is harmonious: moral agency growing out of desire and manifest in the agent’s body—or in its repre­sen­ta­tion. In Kantian terms, the beautiful soul’s inclinations are maxims of the moral law when beauty speaks as grace in this way. When beauty speaks as dignity, however, the agent’s enactment of the moral law is manifest in conflict and suff ering.55 Just a­ fter the Reign of Terror subsided in France, Schiller published “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” in hopes of recovering lost dignity as “we move ­toward freedom through beauty.” The aesthetic person mediates between nature and the ideal. The natu­ral person, by contrast, is torn between two drives: the matter-­drive, when the senses overwhelm the self in time, eradicating freedom and individuality; and the form-­drive, when the rational spirit gives form to sensation timelessly. Although the two drives cannot interact, the w ­ ill constrains both, mediating them through the play-­drive that governs sameness and change within time and beyond it. The play-­drive is the aesthetic princi­ple, and beauty is what play is for: “A ­human plays only when being ­human in the full sense of the word, and he is fully ­human only when he plays.” Freedom in the play-­ drive is beauty—­“the only pos­si­ble expression of freedom in appearance.” Only in play are p ­ eople complete—­unities of moral minds and sensual bodies. To give this harmony a voice—­because a body that can be sensed can never speak freely—we impute freedom to it, responding as if the body

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­ ere ­free and then loving the beauty that speaks freedom in appearance. w Love is the plea­sure we take in that beauty, and the beauty is ­free, in its special way: “by freedom I do not mean the sort that belongs necessarily to ­humans regarded as intelligent, and that can neither be given to nor taken from them, but the kind that is based upon a mixed nature.” Since beauty just is freedom, it has no fixed content: ­under the moral law, the beautiful soul can make itself into any beauty whatsoever.56 In modern unchurched humanism, Schiller’s princi­ple is the organic completeness of f­ ree and self-­made ­humans as body / soul composites capable of expressing both grace and dignity ­under the moral law—an ideal not remotely in keeping with the asceticism of Pico’s Oration, which urges p ­ eople to separate their souls from their bodies. Schiller contends that when grace and dignity “are united in the same person, the expression of humanity is completed in that person who stands t­ here justified in the world of spirit and exonerated in appearance. . . . ​In a s miling mouth, a lively but gentle glance and a serene forehead, reason’s freedom rises with modest radiance, and, with a sublime farewell, nature’s necessity retreats from the noble majesty of a face. The ancients made art according to this ideal of h ­ uman beauty—as we recognize in the divine figure of a Niobe.” “Like Niobe, all tears”: following Hamlet’s ­father to the grave, Gertrude wept like Niobe, but only like Niobe. Hamlet’s m ­ other was not ­really all tears, not even a m ­ other still weeping for her c­ hildren as she turned to stone—so eff ective was the voice of dignity in Niobe’s body. Schiller’s theory, though inspired by Winckelmann’s classicism, was not pagan. It was secular, however: even in a lifeless statue, representing a body animated by a soul but joined with it rather than subordinated to it, we see a b ody’s dignity. The complete ­human person, an ensouled body as much as an embodied soul, need not—­cannot—­escape the body in order to achieve dignity. This is the theory that Schiller found by trying to improve on Kant’s aesthetics, thereby taking the modern concept of dignity even farther from Pico’s body-­hating mysticism.57

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Pico Reviled and Redeemed Why have we taken so long to get to the dignity of man? . . . ​The phi­los­o­phers are establishing this dignity, and ­people ­w ill learn to feel it. —­h e ge l

1. ​Pico with Dignity? By 1791, when William Enfield’s En­g lish abridgment of Brucker’s History appeared, Kant had finished his third Critique. He was already famous enough to be named to the Berlin Acad­emy, then notorious enough for the Prus­sian government to censure him. So novel was his system that Brucker’s books—­half a ­century old—­were cut off from the philosophical conversation, though the information in them was still valuable. In an eleven-­volume History of Philosophy begun in 1798, Wilhelm Tennemann covered the same ground, giving Brucker’s material a new Kantian voice. Tennemann studied theology and philosophy, staying loyal to Leibniz ­until Karl Reinhold’s Letters converted him to Kant. He translated Hume and Locke and also read Plato, preparing to treat the ancients as precursors of the critical philosophy. By the time his History started to appear, however, Kant’s revolution already seemed retrograde to some observers. But he stuck to his plan, still incomplete when he died in 1819, while Hegel was giving his first Berlin lectures on the history of philosophy. Tennemann focused on topics relevant to Kant’s system and judged them by Kantian criteria. Convinced that the critical philosophy surpassed all o ­ thers, he went beyond the usual partitions based on external events—­ancient, medieval, and modern—­aiming to or­ga­nize his story around changes within the discipline that led up to Kant’s revolution.1 255

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He planned a na rrative in seven parts, weighted ­toward antiquity. His fifth period, when reason was enslaved by religion, went from early Christian times through Ockham. In the sixth period, he found phi­los­o­phers smashing their scholastic chains and reclaiming autonomy. This was a breakthrough to philosophical modernity, but the causality invoked by Tennemann—­the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the reform of the Church, the rise of a m ­ iddle class—­left the Re­nais­sance and Reformation detached from philosophy. The seventh and final part of the History started with Francis Bacon and continued through Kant’s immediate pre­de­ces­sors. Tennemann’s critical history looked at the Re­nais­sance with precritical eyes, seeing its two key accomplishments as recovering old Greek systems and inventing some new ones. One of Pico’s aims was to bring Platonism back. But his Platonism—or rather Neoplatonism—­looked like Schwärmerei, dogmatism gone mad with overripe delusions of the supersensible. Re­nais­sance Aristotelians, on the other hand, won Tennemann’s approval: none of the revived schools did more than t­ hese Peripatetics to prevent philosophy from “sinking into the depths of mysticism.” Even the maligned Piero Pomponazzi earned re­spect: in his period and Pico’s, scholasticism declined, reason was unchained, and phi­los­o­phers gained more freedom. Like Brucker, Tennemann told a long story about Re­nais­sance philosophy and gave Pico a leading part—­much of it scripted by the prince’s nephew and by Brucker.2 In Tennemann’s telling, Pico was an erudite, polyglot genius driven by ambition and pursued by jealous rivals. Amazingly quick and im­mensely curious, he was neither deep nor original. Although sincere piety sparked his ardor for the Mosaic law and inspired him to search in Kabbalah for keys to Christian mysteries, he turned his back on reason by mixing Jewish secrets with Platonic ideas. He even found proof of Christ’s miracles in Kabbalah and magic. Trying to win glory by solving the hardest puzzles, he failed and suff ered condemnation instead. ­After the disputation was canceled, “he renounced the world more and more and became a mystical-­ religious enthusiast (Schwärmer), pursuing the study of theology and Platonic-­Kabbalistic philosophy with ­great zeal. Yet his keen spirit could not be completely shackled by t­ hese monstrosities, and at last he recognized the deceptions of astrological superstition.” Even though he fought the astrologers, and although all his fights ­were brief, his “enthusiastic predilection for Platonic-­Kabbalistic philosophy was not without example and eff ect. The interest in secret knowledge dates partly from him, . . . ​the



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first to arouse this passion and connect it with Chris­tian­ity.” Like Ficino before him and his nephew ­after him, Pico corrupted reasoning with poetry and fantasy, contributing his specialty of Kabbalah to “the w ­ hole school of modern enthusiastic (schwärmerisch) philosophy”—­Agrippa, Böhme, Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, Francesco Patrizi, and Francis Mercury Van Helmont. Schwärmerei captured the prince young, leaving him l­ ittle time to find real learning. His approach to philosophy was instrumental: it was a t ool for reinforcing religion. To that end, he produced expositions of Plato and Aristotle but gave “no deep account of what the capacity for knowledge is.”3 Within limits prescribed by religion, however, he valued autonomy and prized his freedom of thought. Though he was guilty of syncretism, he passed some of the eclectic and Kantian tests. His piety was sincere, his spirituality was earnest, and his eventual attack on astrology was resolute. In addition, “he formed some correct maxims for philosophizing that ­under dif­fer­ent . . . ​circumstances could and would have taken him farther.” He was a “mystic of a n oble type” who not only “understood the value (Würde) of the philosophy that makes itself its own reward” but also rejected “reason’s arrogant claim to investigate the nature of divinity, instead supporting a ­simple, basic inquiry—­without prejudice—­meant to reach a self-­understanding suited to the dignity (Würde) of man. . . . ​His way of thinking, always in harmony with Chris­tian­ity, was a b ulwark against excessive dogmatism and superstition.” This summary judgment of Pico, lax by Brucker’s eclectic standards, alludes to the title of the Oration while preaching epistemic restraint—­a Kantian ideal that has no place in that audacious speech.4 Nevertheless, Pico had come a l ong way since Brucker and Voltaire denounced him. They both savaged him for syncretism and ignored the Oration’s comments on ­human choice. But the speech made an impression on Tennemann. He assumed that critical analy­sis was out of reach in Pico’s day, but he thought that the prince resisted reason’s impulse to know divinity and that he kept his goals compatible with h ­ uman dignity. Tennemann’s reasons for respecting Pico w ­ ere Kantian. Like Brucker, he judged him by philosophical standards, but his standards w ­ ere critical—­ not eclectic.5 It would be hard to exaggerate the eff ect on Pico’s fame of what Tennemann saw prefigured in him. The short but crucial remark about dignity is missing, however, from his most influential work—­not the

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eleven-­volume History but the much shorter Outline of the History of Philosophy for Academic Instruction, first published in 1812. Three more editions appeared by 1825, and in 1832 Arthur Johnson’s En­glish translation followed Greek, Italian, and French (by Victor Cousin) versions of this very popu­lar textbook. Reciting Kantian formulas, the 1852 En­glish text describes the desire for a “science of the . . . ​laws of nature and freedom” as a basic ­human drive. This impulse gathers force from “the progressive development of self-­k nowledge through reason” as vari­ous thinkers “endeavour to approximate this idea of reason” and “reason develops itself in conformity to its own law.” 6 Fundamental tensions between freedom and nature energize ­human culture, including philosophy. In this framework, Tennemann’s History—­ unlike Brucker’s—­saw the philosophical Pico recognizing ­human dignity in his speech, and other Kantians would make much of this finding. But Tennemann’s Outline abridges it away. In the En­glish version—­reissued just a few years before Burckhardt caused another large change in the prince’s fortunes—­Pico is just a thinker of “superior parts but extravagant (schwärmerisch) imagination” who harmonized Plato and Aristotle, Platonized Kabbalah for Christian purposes, refuted astrological superstition, but also opened the door for Reuchlin, Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the Rosicrucians. Where the Outline mentions the prince, t­ here is no dignity to put in a Pico Box. If this was an accident of compression, it was an odd one—­even though room for the Re­nais­sance was shrinking in histories of philosophy as Kant’s ­century ended and Hegel’s began.7 In Tennemann’s History, Pico’s awareness of ­human dignity—­like his opposition to astrology—­compensates for Schwärmerei, while in the Outline ­there is no mitigating talk about dignity. The harsher message of the shorter story continued not only in the many versions of Tennemann’s textbook but also in imitators and competitors. Within Kant’s lifetime, Dieterich Tiedemann and Johann Buhle wrote two other large histories. In 1797 Tiedemann completed his Spirit of Speculative Philosophy in six volumes—­the first since Brucker’s on the scale of the Critical History. Buhle compressed his nine-­volume Textbook of the History of Philosophy into a more digestible History of Modern Philosophy since the Era of the Restoration of Knowledge. The briefer work, finished in 1805, was as influential in French and Italian as Tennemann’s Outline was in En­glish. A Göttingen gradu­ate like Buhle and Tiedemann, Christoph Meiners also wrote about philosophy, especially its history. His Biographies of Famous



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Men in the Age of the Restoration of Knowledge, finished in 1797, collects studies of Re­nais­sance thinkers.8 Tiedemann was an eclectic who disliked Kant; he opposed him in the controversies of the 1790s while writing his history—­the Speculative Philosophy, which is friendlier than usual to medieval thought and less loyal to the Reformation. He recognized the Re­nais­sance as a t ime when philosophy recovered, broke ­free of theology, but had nothing original to put in its place. He classified Pico with opponents of scholasticism, giving him three pages as a memory artist and glory seeker who eventually found religion: “In his 900 t­ heses t­ here was no real philosophical spirit,” according to Tiedemann, “no deep insight or conceptual clarity or solidity. And what Pico wrote about the conflict between Platonists and Peripatetics . . . ​contains no observation of any significance.” He had ­little interest in the prince, no more than one would expect of an Enlightened eclectic: his Pico was a m inor player in a s hort scene from the fifteenth ­century, Ficino’s “helper in the vineyards of Plato and Plotinus.”9 Tiedemann said nothing at all about the Oration, nor did Buhle—­who approved of Kant, with reservations, and took Pico and his era more seriously. Essentially the same account of late medieval and early modern philosophy appears in Buhle’s Textbook and in his History, with thirty pages on Pico in one and twenty in the other. He tracked pro­gress ­toward clear thinking through cycles of philosophical change. As in antiquity, conflict between Platonists and Peripatetics in the Re­nais­sance led to a skeptical impasse, broken only by Bacon. Pico made pro­gress, however: as compared to Ficino’s h ­ andling of philosophy, “his was more level-­headed in one way, though in other ways incomparably more enthusiastic (schwärmerischer) and wilder.” Almost half of Buhle’s account goes to the right-­thinking part of the prince’s work—­the attack on astrology, praised as a product of his maturity that improved on the syncretism of the 900 t­ heses. Starting as a “mystical religious enthusiast (Schwärmer),” Pico fi­nally rejected superstition. Even so, he “was not r­ eally a teacher of philosophy, though his writings and reputation had extraordinary influence on the thought of his period.”10 Buhle wrote Pico out of the history of philosophy while acknowledging his late escape from Schwärmerei by rejecting astrology. Considering the length and difficulty of the Disputations, his detailed summary of that work prob­ably helped Pico’s reputation more than Tennemann’s few allusions to the Oration. Buhle must have had access to the speech, since he

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knew other writings by Pico well enough to summarize them. Did he fail to read it? Or did he just find it unremarkable? As of the early nineteenth ­century—­when he, Tiedemann, and Tennemann had all spoken on Pico in new histories of philosophy—­the Oration was still obscure enough to leave such questions hanging. Pico was still a Schwärmer and—­despite what Tennemann said about dignity—­not yet celebrated as an advocate of that idea. The speech got a l­ ittle more attention from Meiners, who—­like Blount but more ambitiously—­produced intellectual biographies of phi­los­o­phers but no comprehensive history of the discipline. Often denounced for his views about race, he was anti-­Kantian and officially eclectic, though his derivative ideas w ­ ere closer to the ‘popu­lar philosophy’ of Justus Hennings and ­others.11 His Biographies of Famous Men pre­sents “the life and writings of Count Johannes Picus of Mirandula.” The treatment is respectful, substantial—110 pages—­but negative. The praise that Pico won from his peers was more than h ­ uman and less than justified: talent, virtue, and influence w ­ ere blighted by excess. Meiners told a familiar story: the crux of the prince’s life was the canceled disputation. ­Until the pope disgraced him, ambition and plea­sure ruled his be­hav­ior, driving him to extremes. Hunger for learning became a disease; desire for freedom turned into caprice; piety bred superstition. Still, he found concord where ­others saw only conflict, and the harmonies that he promoted foreshadowed the ­great Leibniz. On the other hand, his magic entranced Agrippa, Reuchlin, and o ­ thers—­a pernicious fascination that lured its victims into his own childish blunders.12 Of all his virtues, the foremost was piety, expressed in devotional works. ­ attle, “life is but In Meiners’s paraphrase of Twelve Weapons for Spiritual B a dream and a shadow. Death comes without warning. . . . ​Vice degrades the dignity (Würde) of ­human nature.” He noticed Pico’s asceticism and disliked it, observing (like ­others) that a person born to power might have done the world more good by not withdrawing from it. Taken to extremes, his virtues became liabilities. “We cannot help but deplore Pico’s piety as a weakness,” wrote Meiners, “­because from the start it led him into superstition and enthusiasm (Schwärmerei) and, had he lived longer, it would have made him useless for the world, shut away with Dominicans in a cloister.” ­After the pope crushed him, Pico turned farther from the world. Moreover, “since the public debate was thwarted, he had wasted his time writing the speech On the Dignity of Man that he had meant to open his disputation.



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In this speech, with the heat and unction of Platonico-­Kabbalism, Pico locates the high stature and destiny (Erhabenheit und Bestimmung) of h ­ uman nature in searching for truth and clarity, with no reward except what comes from having the truth.” Calling the Oration a waste of time made worse by Schwärmerei, Meiners followed up with some lines not from the beginning of the speech but from the m ­ iddle, where Pico’s point was philosophical autonomy, not the dignity of man.13 To write this biography, Meiners searched beyond Brucker’s History and Gianfrancesco’s Vita, gathering evidence from Pico’s contemporaries and reviewing all the published works and letters; he even compared early printed editions. Despite this thorough inquiry, h ­ uman dignity failed to register with him as a s alient item of Pico’s thought. More interested in character than ideas, he told the prince’s story as a cautionary tale of recklessness and reform, ending it with a summary of “the most useful of all the works of the Count of Mirandula, his twelve books against the astrologers.” The result of this proj­ect of his maturity was that he “turned away from excessive admiration for the wisdom of eastern p ­ eoples, especially their magic and Kabbalah. Real inquiry into history as well as intense desire to combat the dangers of superstition led him back again to the path of truth that he had lost in his youthful enthusiasm (Schwärmerei) and hunger for distinction. Unhappy are ­those who follow the footsteps of the Count of Mirandula in his youthful errors and pay no heed to the clarifications in which he recanted his e­ arlier ­mistakes.” About the dignity of man, Meiners himself learned nothing from Pico—­only that genius corrupted by Schwärmerei could recover from that disease of a pious heart.14

2. ​Pico for Phi­los­o­phers and Theologians Tennemann—­a long with Brucker, Buhle, Stanley, and Tiedemann—­was cited and discussed by Hegel in his Introduction to the Lectures on the His­ ntil his tory of Philosophy, first off ered at Jena in 1805 and continued u death in 1831. Despite their fame and despite the im­mense influence of Hegel’s system, his scholarship in the Lectures was not on a par with his philosophy. He treated erudition as dead weight, and he usually relied on Tennemann and other secondary authorities, especially for topics that bored him—­Renaissance philosophy, for example. He respected the originality of Stanley’s History but dismissed it as obsolete—­except as lit­er­a­ture. Likewise, even though the sheer “mass of

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information” in Brucker’s Critical History was useful to him, the author’s prejudices made it unreliable—­“ full of padding while the profit from it is small.” Only extracts from old books added value to Tiedemann’s Speculative Philosophy, whose title Hegel mocked as false billing for a tedious per­ for­mance, “wooden and unintelligent, . . . ​stiff and aff ected. The w ­ hole ­thing is a sad example,” he complained, “of a man who . . . ​sacrificed his entire life to . . . ​speculative philosophy and yet had no inkling of the speculative spirit.” Hegel liked Buhle’s Textbook better, finding it handy for obscure sources, though skimpy on ancient thought and also wordy. He called Tennemann’s History the “most comprehensive” work of its kind yet undependable: Kantian commitments trapped the author in dogma. He praised thinkers whom he should have condemned, Hegel warned, “but the story always begins and ends with a famous phi­los­o­pher diminished b ­ ecause of still having one defect, namely that he was not a Kantian: he had not investigated the source of knowledge critically and had not reached the result, namely, that knowledge is impossible. Thus this entire history is completely unintelligent and lifeless.” Hegel’s sarcasm exploited the deference shown to Kant by disciples like Tennemann—­and by the master himself.15 In 1799, ­after charges of atheism had driven Johann Fichte from Jena, Kant wanted nothing to do with the upstart who had risen to fame in his wake only to challenge the critical philosophy. Responding to a remark (in a review of a book by Buhle) that the Critiques ­were warm-­ups for Fichte’s Doctrine of Knowledge, Kant disclaimed the new teachings as “wholly untenable,” proclaiming that “the critical philosophy, through its unstoppable tendency to satisfy reason, . . . ​must feel the conviction that no change of opinion, no subsequent improvement nor any doctrinal construct of another form is imminent: the system of the Critique rests on a completely secure foundation, firm forever, and is indispensable to humanity’s highest aims for all ­future ages.” Renovations ­were on the way, nonetheless—­truer than Kant’s haughty words to his own ideal of an “unstoppable tendency to satisfy reason.” The changes would go farther than he feared.16 Hegel historicized Kant’s conception of freedom and self-­determination in a new system as intricate as the critical philosophy and even more ambitious. In history Hegel saw “the Spirit’s consciousness of its freedom and the realization of freedom resulting from this consciousness . . . ​in a series of steps.” Since what realizes the Spirit’s freedom is not an individual but a community conforming to reason, history moves t­ oward its goal through



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a sequence of cultural forms—­Volksgeister, each expressing the Spirit (Geist) better than the last and each formed by a par­tic­u­lar ­people (Volk). The individual’s education in freedom goes in tandem with group obligations, so that p ­ eople can live the full life of reason only in communities, best of all in the State.17 “Among all the phenomena of history, our true object is the State, . . . ​ the universal Idea and universal spiritual life to which individuals react from birth with trust and habit, in which they have their being and real­ ity.” States take higher forms as “world history travels from east to west, for Eu­rope is the absolute end of history.” Pro­gress has three phases, beginning in the Orient, moving through the Greek world, and culminating in the Germanic nations. Oriental p ­ eoples ­were unfree: they lived ­under despots and did not “know that the Spirit or humanity as such is ­free in itself. . . . ​They knew only that one is ­free, . . . ​this one who is . . . ​merely a despot. . . . ​The consciousness of freedom first arose among the Greeks, . . . ​ who knew only that some, and not humanity as such, are f­ ree. . . . ​The Germanic nations, with the coming of Chris­tian­ity, ­were the first to realize that humanity, as ­human, is ­free by nature. . . . ​This consciousness first arose in religion.” Rome’s fall, Charlemagne’s reign, and the empire of Charles V divided the final Germanic age into three periods, reaching to Hegel’s own time. The Reformation liberated the Spirit from sensuous externalities and enabled Protestant Eu­rope to resolve the conflict of clergy and laity in the modern State, in the Enlightenment—­and with the advent of Hegel.18 He saw the Re­nais­sance as productive in culture and the arts, though not in politics or philosophy. As stronger monarchies brought stability to the l­ater M ­ iddle Ages, the Spirit r­ ose to a higher stage in secular society, where “art inspires and animates the external, the merely sensuous, with form, expressing soul, sentiment and the Spirit so that devotion does not simply attend to the sensuous ­thing in front of it, and the object of piety is not a mere ­thing.” Raphael’s Virgins inspire more than reverence: ­great art transcends the Church and ­frees itself to learn from science and erudition. While Raphael lived, artists and scholars alike discovered freedom in antiquity, while in their newer world “technology arose when the need was felt”—­printing, gunpowder and the compass. “Three events—­the so-­called restoration of learning, the blossoming of the fine arts, and the discovery of Amer­i­ca,” according to Hegel, “are like a blush of dawn that . . . ​fi­nally broke ­after the long, momentous and frightful night of the ­Middle Ages.”19

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Although Leibniz was the last phi­los­o­pher in Hegel’s canon to pay much attention to the Re­nais­sance, scholasticism survived in Christian Wolff and ­others whom Hegel had studied, making him more familiar with medieval ideas. But he disliked the M ­ iddle Ages for lifelessness in religion and formalism in thought. His attitude ­toward the Renaissance—­especially its art, scholarship, and enterprise—­was friendlier. Even so, as the Volksgeister advanced from Oriental through Greek to Germanic culture, they found it hard to make their way from pagan Rome to a Christian Reformation. And the Re­nais­sance went astray by trying to lift itself out of time with classicism: “An ­earlier philosophy does not satisfy the Spirit when a more deeply determined concept lives in it.” Less abstractly: the old heathens could not r­ eally converse with postmedieval Christians. Like the State, philosophy moved on inexorably—­“to satisfy reason,” as Kant had said—­even though Re­nais­sance thinkers tried to reverse the Spirit’s march by reviving the ancients. Accordingly, Hegel made a case for ignoring the Re­nais­sance in the history of philosophy. As his argument uncoiled, his contorted language turned colorful: ­ very philosophy, just ­because it represents a par­tic­u­lar stage of developE ment, belongs to its own time and is trapped in the limitations of that time. . . . ​The philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and so on certainly live . . . ​, but philosophy is no longer . . . ​at the level where Platonism, Aristotelianism, and so on ­were. For this reason, Platonists and Aristotelians can no longer exist ­today. . . . ​The revival of learning . . . ​began not just with new studies but by making old philosophies live again. Marsilius Ficinus was a Platonist, . . . ​Pomponazzi was a pure Aristotelian. . . . ​­People had a general sense that Greek philosophy was opposed to Chris­tian­ity, but no par­tic­u­lar philosophy developed from this opposition; what ­people had and could have . . . ​was one of ­those old philosophies taken up again in this way. But mummies cannot last among the living. . . . ​Imitating princi­ples that have become strange to the Spirit and repeating them from afar appears as transient in history, even when done in a dead language. Th ­ ese are only translations, nothing original. . . . ​When recent times are called again to revert to the attitude of a Greek philosophy, . . . ​ this counsel of humility has the same source as suggesting that a civilized society should go back to being savages in the forests of North Amer­i­ca.

Of all the sins that Re­nais­sance thinkers might have been asked to repent, savagery should have come low on Hegel’s list. Elsewhere he made his point



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more believably: “At first, the revival of the . . . ​study of ancient lit­er­a­ture in connection with philosophy was in part just a revival of the old philosophy . . . ​with nothing newsworthy.” Stoics, Epicureans, Neoplatonists, Plato himself, and a newly Hellenized Aristotle became the anti-­scholastic fashion, but “such eff orts are more noteworthy for promoting education than for producing original philosophy, and we learn nothing new.”20 Hegel’s small interest in Re­nais­sance philosophy reflected his theory of history, but he did not ignore the period entirely. He singled out five figures—­Bruno, Campanella, Girolamo Cardano, Peter Ramus, and Giulio Cesare Vanini—­whose eruptive anx­i­eties and troubled energies expressed talent as well as discomfort with their times. Some experts now place ­t hese stormy souls in the Re­nais­sance, but Hegel assigned them to the Reformation—­not just b ­ ecause they wrote a­ fter 1517 but b ­ ecause their Spirit was of that time. “While the old philosophy was quietly reemerging, a number of ebullient figures drove t­ oward learning and knowledge and science in a violent and agitated way, feeling the impulse to make being out of themselves and create truth, . . . ​­people of a restless and rapturous kind, of a wild and unsettled character, enthusiastic (enthusiastisch) by nature.”21 Scholars like Pico, on the other hand, wanted to revive antiquity in peace and quiet. E ­ arlier versions of Hegel’s Lectures make ­little room for him, ignoring even the Schwärmerei condemned by so many ­others. His comment on both princes barely fills a Pico Box: Two Picos—­both Counts of Mirandula, the elder named Johann and the nephew Johann Franz—­had more influence through their traits of character and originality. The former drew up nine hundred ­t heses, fifty-­five from Proclus, and invited all phi­los­o­phers to a ceremonious disputation on them, off ering as Prince to pay the costs of travel for ­t hose who lived far away.

Johann all but vanishes in the ­later Lectures, where only the ­theses and the princely gesture survive as afterthoughts. Although Hegel’s notes are full of references to Brucker, Tennemann, and o ­ thers who covered the Re­nais­ sance extensively, his novel sense of the past brought new choices with it. Of the few figures between Ramon Llull and Francis Bacon that he mentions, only Bruno gets as much notice as Böhme, the Schwärmer whom he called “the first German phi­los­o­pher.”22

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Hegel’s Lectures sometimes lack the scope and depth of the e­ arlier histories that he relied on—as in his skimpy treatment of Pico. Heinrich Ritter, a young rival, had more to say about the prince and the Re­nais­sance in a twelve-­volume History of Philosophy that outdid Tennemann’s for bulk when it was finished in 1853. The two main divisions are Antiquity in four volumes and Christian Philosophy in eight. The title of the second part reflects the influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the theological voice of German Romanticism. When Hegel moved to Berlin in 1818, Schleiermacher was a competitor whom he nee­d led—as wordy when writing history and as a Schwärmer when talking religion. He described Schleiermacher’s edition of Heraclitus as “a mass of learning . . . ​easier to write than read,” and his theology as one of the “excrescences that emerged from Fichte’s philosophy.” “A dog o ­ ught to be the best Christian,” Hegel snarled, ­because Schleiermacher based religion wholly on a “feeling of dependence.” Although Ritter was Schleiermacher’s student, Hegel was polite to him—­compared to his assault on the young man’s teacher. The beginner’s sins about ancient philosophy ­were venial, he de­cided, not mortal like Brucker’s errors.23 When Ritter was chided by Hegel for inaccuracy about ancient thought, he was not the first or last apprentice caught in a crossfire between professors. But philosophical sniping did ­little damage to his History in German or to its several French versions and one in En­glish. Ritter broke the Kantian mold when readers w ­ ere ready for a story that responded to changing times. Recognition from Eduard Zeller in 1843 was especially helpful. Zeller’s approach was as close to Schleiermacher’s as to Hegel’s, and his star was rising: the first installment of his Philosophy of the Greeks (a condensed En­glish version is still in print) came out in 1844, ten years before he joined the neo-­Kantian movement in its earliest phase.24 Ritter located the first “modern philosophy” in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The period takes up nearly an eighth of his History, four times the coverage in Hegel’s Lectures, and his account of Pico is more serious, though not very long: 19 pages where Paracelsus gets 32 and Bruno 58. Ritter grouped Pico with “Platonists and theosophists”—­Agrippa, Charles Bouelles, Ficino, Francesco Giorgio, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, Thomas More, and Reuchlin.25 He criticized the prince’s “enthusiastic (schwärmerisch) nephew” for hiding the seedier side of his ­uncle’s character—­revealed by his letters.



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Pico was ambitious, at heart a scholar and a poet, and not saintly enough to have destroyed all his youthful verses, despite Gianfrancesco’s protests. He was pious, but he mixed piety with worldly wisdom. His philosophy was “only a primer for theology,” however, and he subordinated theology to religion. He treated dialectic, ethics, and physics as salves for the soul, believing that “philosophy is just the beginning of religion.” Ultimately, “our goal is God. The way that Pico describes our u ­ nion with him reminds one only too much of the obscurities of mystical contemplation. The power that this mystical tendency has over him reveals itself most of all when he exalts it over the work of freedom.” It was Gianfrancesco Pico, not Giovanni, whom Ritter called a Schwärmer, but the elder Pico’s mystical extravagance was also too much for him.26 Yet he tried to rescue his subject—­“of strikingly fair appearance in the flower of his youth”—­from the slough of enthusiasm. “What Pico combats with special zeal is superstition,” he claimed, adding that “he aimed his most extensive eff ort at astrology.” Belief in natu­ral magic was consistent with this position b ­ ecause Pico thought that this good magic “could work no miracle.” In writings that nourished occultism and belied his intentions, his greatest ­mistake was promoting Kabbalah, “which he was the first of the Platonists to recommend eagerly.” At the same time, he was not as otherworldly as some Platonists of the day—­more in tune with his time than Ficino, for example. He warned against the excesses of mystical theology, tempered Plato with Aristotle, and accommodated naturalism while seeking “unity with ourselves and with the world around us in order to gain peace with God; and the more he examined and understood the need to combat superstition, the more he saw that this could be done only through research into the natu­ral world as distinct from the super­natural. In ­these endeavors he turned t­ oward modern times.”27 Rather than just summarizing texts, like Buhle, Ritter painted an organic picture of Pico’s thought—in the manner of Schleiermacher. Without stressing intellectual growth, he suggested it—­rescuing Pico from early errors by citing ­later works against them. The result, as in the biography by Meiners, is a Pico who repents childish raptures and heads ­toward modernity by respecting the natu­ral world and turning against superstition. Ritter clinched his case with the Heptaplus and De ente et uno, but he also cited the Oration to confirm that “we can also live the life of all t­ hings and, through our w ­ ill, appropriate to ourselves internally all that they bring with them.”

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“­These are the ­human transformations of which poets and phi­los­o­phers have spoken,” he continued, alluding to Pico’s statement about “metamorphoses solemnized by Hebrews and Pythagoreans”—­words that follow this passage in the speech: In man at birth the F ­ ather has planted seeds of e­ very kind and sprouts of e­ very type of life, and if anyone cultivates them, they w ­ ill grow and bear their fruit in him. If the seeds he tends are vegetal, the man ­w ill be a plant. If they are sensual, he ­w ill grow into a beast. If they are rational, he w ­ ill turn into a heavenly animal. If they are intellectual, he w ­ ill be an angel and a son of God. And if he is not contented with the lot of creatures and draws himself into the center of his own unity, becoming a spirit and one with God, this one who has been set above every­t hing ­w ill stand ahead of them all and absolutely apart in the ­Father’s darkness.

Ritter did not muffle the somber note that ends this rhapsody. He let his reading rest on what came first: “Pico puts the greatest stress on ­human life; . . . ​love ­will draw us to the world’s creatures and then to God as well.” Knowing that Pico aimed for mystical darkness, Ritter looked past the shadows to a brighter naturalism in the ­later works.28 Alongside the prince’s reliance on ancient oracles, Ritter saw a “much newer way of thinking. For the dignity of man (Würde des Menschen) he has the highest regard.” Unlike Ficino and Nicholas of Cusa, who settled humanity in a single place with a l­ imited nature, Pico declared (in Ritter’s telling) that “man is confined by no par­t ic­u ­lar nature. He shares only in the universal nature ­because he is ­f ree; hence, he has it in his own power to become what he wants. For that purpose God placed him in the ­middle of the world so that he can look all around and make every­t hing his own, lower and higher, as he wishes.” The note supporting this paraphrase cites most of the Latin text b ­ ehind the similar words that Burckhardt would write ten years ­later, digesting God’s speech to Adam in the Oration: For o ­ thers, a definite nature is confined within laws that we have prescribed. With no strictures confining you, you w ­ ill determine that nature by your own choice, which is the authority ­under which I have put you. I have set you up as the center of the world so that you w ­ ill be better placed to survey what the world contains. And we have made you neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that on



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your own, as molder and maker, specially appointed to decide, you may shape yourself in the form that you prefer. You can sink back into lower forms that are beasts; from your own resolute spirit, you can be born again to higher forms that are divine.29

In the fifty notes to this chapter, Ritter cited the Oration seven times (on dignity and other topics: love, concord, strife, internality, and religion), making the speech more vis­i­ble than ever before. Tennemann had noticed Pico’s interest in dignity. But when Ritter first mentioned the idea, he ­ ere added a note to name the Oration as its source, treating the text as if it w unfamiliar: “He puts it at the head of his speech De hominis dignitate,” Ritter explained, “with which he meant to introduce his disputation in Rome.” Using the Oration to establish Pico’s praise of dignity would have been enough to call Burckhardt’s attention to the speech that he would make more famous. If Burckhardt had read Ritter, however, he should also have noticed the mysticism that had to be explained away.30 Two years before Burckhardt published, Georg Dreydorff brought out “a monographic pre­sen­ta­tion of the philosophical system . . . ​of Count Johannes Pico,” advertised as the first of its kind. Published in 1858, ἀ e System of Johannes Pico was the most brutal attack on its subject since Brucker and Voltaire. A dedication to Zeller tied Dreydorff ’s hostility to German politics and religion. As a student of Ferdinand Bauer and a friend of David Strauss, Zeller was party to the historicizing of early Chris­tian­ity that led to Strauss’s shocking Life of Jesus in 1835. Before Zeller taught Dreydorff at Marburg, moving from the theological faculty to philosophy, he had helped found a new theological journal at Tübingen, and in 1853 he finished a b ook on Zwingli’s ἀ eological System. Meanwhile, a y ounger Tübingen theologian, Christoph Sigwart, produced a prize essay on Ulrich Zwingli in 1851. In 1855 he expanded it to correct what he took to be Zeller’s errors, adding material on Zwingli’s debt to Pico.31 Sigwart’s thesis, opposed by Zeller, was that Pico foreshadowed Zwingli’s (and Luther’s) revolt against Rome, thus linking Pico with the Reformation—­ German property—in the delicate days ­after 1848. A ­century ­later, Sigwart’s appropriation of Pico was still remembered in Italy as confiscation by aliens—as larceny aggravated by l­ater German scholars, including Ernst Cassirer, who instructed his readers to look for Pico in Nicholas of Cusa’s shadow. From an Italian perspective, “it was up to Burckhardt, within the limits of German cultural history, to ­free himself from the criterion of

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anticipatory Protestantism and to see Pico as the panegyrist of dignitas hominis, in the sense of radical liberation of humanity from ­every bond, . . . ​ and—­referring to God the ­Father’s speech to Adam in the Oration—as the author of the most profound insights.” In fact, Tennemann had already made this point obliquely and Ritter had stated it explic­itly. Sigwart also read the Oration as a de claration of ­human freedom from nature’s constraints and of man’s capacity to fashion himself as he chooses.32 Zwingli, who had philological interests, was a plausible voice for Sigwart’s claim that Reformers sometimes learned from Re­nais­sance classicism. Zwingli revered the Bible as holy writ but also studied it as an ancient text. He also read Pico’s writings and, according to Sigwart, used them to construct a t heory of God as the highest good and of man as created to seek that good in ­union with God. ­Because God’s unity is inaccessible to him, the carnal ­human must stretch ­human nature beyond the body ­toward immaterial spirit. In the Oration—as Sigwart understood it—­“the duty of man is to rise up to the highest unity, to God . . . ​by a synergy of all the sciences.” By purging, enlightening, and perfecting himself, man can merge with God—if he chooses: “He is f­ ree, and this freedom exists not as if in contradiction to the universal de­pen­dency of all being and becoming on God.”33 Reliance on a sovereign divinity restrains the freedom to act and assert the ­will. For Zwingli, however, freedom was from the law and works—­a negative freedom—­leaving room for the determinism that stiff ened in him as he moved away from Erasmian culture. Describing the economy of grace and election in reformed theology, Sigwart claimed that this was “an act of freedom and a call to freedom,” even though Zwingli kept the ­will unfree. Pico, who lacked “the character that made Zwingli a R eformer,” never seriously confronted the dilemmas of predestination, according to Sigwart. Pico’s role in his book was to make a p olemical point against Zeller, whom he criticized for tracing Zwingli’s theology of divine sovereignty and ­human subservience to the Reformer’s conviction of election—­a merely subjective expression of the wish to be saved. On the contrary, replied Sigwart, it was scholarly responsibility and commitment to truth rather than personal anxiety that guided Zwingli to the teachings that he took from Pico.34 One work by Zwingli that Sigwart found indebted to Pico is a treatise on providence in which man is “God’s tool.” Given the stark opposition between Pico’s account of Adam as “specially appointed to decide” and



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Zwingli’s doctrine of the w ­ ill as entirely determined, Dreydorff might have challenged Sigwart on his own ground by contrasting the determinism in Zwingli’s system with the voluntarism in Pico’s. Instead he disqualified Pico as a guide to systematic theology b ­ ecause he produced no system worthy of the name.35 Of seven previous treatments of Pico mentioned by Dreydorff , the only two that he took seriously ­were Sigwart’s and Tennemann’s, though he also cited Meiners in his patchy digest of Pico’s life and works. He rejected Tennemann’s conclusion that Pico was “a bulwark against excessive dogmatism and superstition” and dismissed Ritter’s chapter as unsystematic. Tennemann too was unsystematic, and confused as well: he wanted Pico to be the guardian of reason, but he could not extricate him from Neoplatonic “dreaming and raving (schwärmereien).”36 Neoplatonism and Catholicism ­were sectarian errors that Pico made worse by mixing them up, according to Dreydorff . ­After indicting the philosophy of concord, he assessed its crimes as confessional: “It needs no proof nor even notice that a person can seldom do well while trying to be a phi­los­o­pher and a good Catholic at the same time.” As for Neoplatonism, Zeller (and many ­others) had already exposed it as a de­cadent hybrid of religion and rationalism suppressed by the genius of Hellas u ­ ntil Greeks ­were orientalized; then, in the latter days of Plotinus and Proclus, knowledge was “replaced by revelation in ecstasy. ­After Greek philosophy had performed this self-­castration, it sank exhausted into the arms of religion, . . . ​while an asceticism . . . ​wholly contrary to the Greek nature . . . ​ accompanied . . . ​the receding of po­liti­cal ideas and the growth of individualism.” Greek culture—­disarmed by the treason of Neoplatonist clerks—­was sometimes identified by German thinkers with themselves and their nation’s triumph over Rome in the Reformation: nationalism solidified Dreydorff ’s hostility to Pico.37 ­After a b ibliographical and biographical introduction, Dreydorff searched for “Pico’s Philosophical System,” starting with “the prob­lem of philosophy and the correct general solution.” The prince stood accused on many counts: philosophical naiveté, delight in the arcane, ballyhoo about Kabbalah, anything construable as arbitrary, subjective, unclear, or unscientific. The verdict was that he failed “to produce a system with genuine theoretical interest but simply expressed a subjective point of view, only that and nothing more, based on the force of circumstance, of ­earlier studies, of vari­ous internal and external experiences and, above all, of internal

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needs—in short, a t issue of dogma in which personal concern for bliss comes first and last.” As for Dreydorff ’s evidence, the only ­thing systematic about it was the order he imposed on it. Using three headings—­God, World, and Man—he took what he needed from any and all of Pico’s works. Though he read them as thoroughly as Ritter had, he ignored the order of the texts and cited isolated passages to prove the prince inconsistent and incompetent.38 He charged that Pico’s theology was unclear on God’s unity and contradictory on his perfection, pointing to “two-­sided and, in fact, mutually incompatible statements about the divine nature.” His cosmology was cloudy and could not clarify God’s relationship with the world. Was Pico’s God transcendent or immanent? The prince could never make up his mind ­because he was just another muddled Neoplatonist. He made no advance on that obsolete system, only degrading its m ­ istakes with Catholic dogma. One grave error was monism, which, in Dreydorff ’s view, could never be sustained by any philosophy—­much less by Pico’s, which vacillated between a pantheist and a transcendent God.39 ­After trashing Pico’s theology and cosmology, he asked “­whether in his philosophy of man one might reach more in­de­pen­dent and sufficiently coherent results.” Although Dreydorff ’s analy­sis is abstract, giving few hints of time, place, or locale, tension builds from his relentless antagonism to this golden child of Eu­ro­pean civilization. ­After getting it so wrong about God and the world, could Pico have done better for mankind?40 No, answered Dreydorff . The aim of Pico’s philosophy was “neither theoretical understanding taken in its own terms nor even practical action but—­like religion (not theology), according to a more accurate formulation of its concept—an activity of purely pathological concern.” The germ of this pathology, for Pico and all Neoplatonists, was dissolute eudaemonism, desiring not just mundane happiness but total bliss in God: this was Dreydorff ’s diagnosis, adding the charge that the prince’s confusion about immanence and transcendence left man’s relation to God unsettled. Could creatures unite with the Creator? Pico thought so, but he also realized that ­people could traverse the higher worlds—­celestial and angelic—­only ­after cleansing their souls of the bodily filth to which a semi-­sensible spirit binds them. No saving conjunction with God would be pos­si­ble ­until souls broke their bonds with m ­ atter and shed their bestial natures. Only then, purged and purified, could they soar above all other animals ­toward the angelic life and redemption.41



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At this point, according to Dreydorff , the only real diff erence between Pico and the Neoplatonists came into play. Th ­ ese pagans ­were sure that mankind’s homeland was a supercelestial intelligible world, but for Pico this sublime destination was only one possibility. To make his point, Dreydorff cited one of the longer passages from the Oration that Ritter also used, where God, the celestial gardener, plants seeds in souls that can bear sensual, rational, or intellectual fruit, surpassing animal existence even in ­t hose who rise no higher than the intellect ­toward the ­Father’s holy darkness. Ritter supplied this same text to show how love in Pico’s speech draws “us to the world’s creatures and then to God as well,” thus building a case for the prince’s eventual turn to naturalism and making this-­worldly sense of God’s speech to Adam about f­ ree choice. But Dreydorff quoted only one of God’s lines, a sentence about man as “molder and maker,” reading it as license for mankind to act not only as “its own lord and ruler but also, so to speak, as its own creator in the first place.” For Ritter, God’s words made Pico modern by showing esteem for the dignity of man. For Dreydorff , they betrayed the antinomies (monism / dualism, immanence / transcendence) that corrupted the rest of Pico’s system and caused its moral collapse. Just as man can stand at the top or the bottom or the center of the world, “so also must one establish such a neutral position for his ethical qualities, whereby we should name him neither good nor evil. Indeed, which way man ­will turn, ­whether to good or to evil, since both at first have the same weight for him, is left entirely to the play of arbitrary, subjective choice.” In Pico’s unsystematic pre­sen­ta­tion, ethics was inauthentic—­ just a c athartic prelude to ecstasy, a cold shower before the soul ascends from philosophy to theology and beyond. Since the mystic’s aim was to get lost in a mystery, t­ here was no morality in mysticism capable of guiding the reason, much less shaping a h ­ uman community.42 Pico’s eudaemonism was a pathology, just as his pseudo-­monist metaphysics was a p retense. In this situation—on the Oration’s advice—­ deliberate flight to the heavenly Jerusalem may have seemed the best way out. But suicide, even if mystical, would be impractical—so Dreydorff assumed. Besides, Pico lacked the stomach for truly rigorous asceticism (Savonarola was Dreydorff ’s in­for­mant), which is why he opted for an Aristotelian ethics no dif­fer­ent from “the secular morality of the Roman church,” where “plea­sure and asceticism alike can find a p lace as times change and needs arise.”

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Pico left h ­ umans passive: ­free ­will only primes the pump for purgation, a­ fter which the sacraments take over as a machinery of maximal joy—­a comforting position for this “submissive son of an infallible church.” Philosophically, Dreydorff concluded, Pico’s premise was mistaken—­treating a desire for happiness as a c riterion of truth. Culturally, this original sin imitated the Neoplatonists, for whom “the idea of God is nothing more than a reflex of ecstatic emotion.” If the prince’s thinking lacked substance and rigor, as Dreydorff maintained, Zwingli cannot have found theological theorems in it, leaving Sigwart without a case against Zeller.43 Dreydorff and Ritter between them, building on Tennemann and the Enlightened historians of philosophy, said almost every­thing—­for better and for worse—­that students of the discipline w ­ ere ­going to say about Pico before the twentieth c­ entury. Ritter, like Sigwart but without the theological polemic, focused more clearly than Tennemann on God’s words to ­ thers continAdam in the Oration. Meanwhile, even though Ritter and o ued to study the Re­nais­sance, some followed Hegel and neglected it—or worse. Arthur Schopenhauer, despite his extraordinary learning, bypassed it completely in his “Fragments on the History of Philosophy” of 1851. In 1878, however, Wilhelm Windelband opened a m ore conventional history of philosophy by examining the Re­nais­sance, and in 1893 his much shorter Lehrbuch became a “ serious textbook” for American students when a University of Chicago professor put it into En­glish. Antiquity got more space than any other period: “The Greek mind . . . ​is more impor­tant than all that has since been thought—­the Kantian philosophy excepted.” This neo-­Kantian, non-­Hegelian, Hellenizing history allotted less than 5  ­percent of its pages to the Re­nais­sance and Reformation. A summary paragraph on Cardinal Bessarion, Ficino, Patrizi, and Gemistos Pletho noted that a “ similar instance of Neo-­Platonism, alloyed with Neo-­ Pythagorean and ancient Pythagorean motives, is aff orded by John Pico of Mirandola.” 44 Windelband detected a conceptual shift in this period, when studies of ancient mathe­matics encouraged the quantitative physics that would eventually eliminate occult qualities. But ­these stirrings of a new science still had the “fantastic metaphysical garb of number-­mysticism and number-­ symbolism. . . . ​Such fantasies ­were followed by men like Cardano and Pico. . . . ​Magic became a favorite subject of thought in the Re­nais­sance, and science again concerned itself with the task of bringing system into superstition. Astrology, . . . ​dreams and signs, necromancy . . . ​all ­these . . . ​­were then



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in their most luxuriant bloom. Pico and Reuchlin brought them into connection with the number-­mysticism.” Nonetheless, “modern natu­ral science is the ­daughter of humanism,” according to Windelband: he found the root of “secular science” in the “anthropocentric” thinking that treated “philosophy as a theory of art and life” and saw natu­ral philosophy as revolving around “man’s position in the cosmos.” And yet Pico’s remarks on the ­human condition ­were forgotten—­even in this neo-­Kantian textbook.45 Books like Windelband’s, used by teachers of philosophy for survey courses, have kept coming ever since. Frank Thilly’s History of Philosophy, still in print in 1957, appeared first in 1914, promising “an impartial and objective attitude.” But the reviser of the third edition put the author “closer to the critical idealism of Kant than to the dogmatic idealism of Hegel.” In fact, Thilly himself edited a leading Kantian journal and studied with one of Kant’s champions, Kuno Fischer. He gave only 3 ­percent of his textbook to the Re­nais­sance, however, in line with Hegel’s priorities. He saw Cusanus as the period’s only original thinker and its other novelties as “crude.” On the other hand, he valued the revival of ancient philosophy for reinforcing challenges to scholasticism. Paragraphs on the “true Aristotle” describe an “attempt . . . ​to reconcile Platonism and Aristotelianism . . . ​by John Pico of Mirandola.” “Occultism” follows in a section on “philosophy of nature and natu­ral science,” where “the desire to unravel the mysteries of the external world assumed a fantastic and charlatanical form in many of the bolder spirits of the times. Instead of employing . . . ​observation and experiment, they hoped, in their impatience, to force the secrets of nature by occult means. . . . ​To this group belong the Platonist John Pico of Mirandola, his nephew Francis and Reuchlin, . . . ​enthusiastic students of the Jewish Cabala.” By this time, some American college students prob­ably read “enthusiastic” as a compliment, and few would have known that Thilly was blaming Pico’s nephew for his ­uncle’s ­mistakes. Still, Thilly’s treatment of occultism as a “precursor of modern science” was longer and more informative than his shorter statements about humanism. “Humanity is rediscovered,” he explained, by recovering the “long neglected heritage of classical civilization,” so that “­human talents are no longer counted as insignificant or despicable.” By t he early twentieth ­century, when Thilly made ­these perfunctory remarks, other assessments—­inspired by Burckhardt and stated with energy—­had already stirred up more excitement about humanism, the Re­nais­sance, and Pico.46

9

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Pippa Passes Pico He became his admirers. —au d e n

1. ​En­glish Enthusiasms “All fantasy should have a solid base in real­ity”: Max Beerbohm’s aphorism of 1946 made light of Zuleika Dobson, his novel of 1911, set in Oxford just before the turn of the c­ entury. Beerbohm outlived the E ­ ngland that he mocked in Zuleika and l­ater in Seven Men. The l­ ittle stories in this book from 1919 account for only six men of the seven. First up is Enoch Soames, a poet so desperate for fame that he gives the Devil his soul to find out what ­people w ­ ill be saying about him ­after a hundred years. The seventh man narrates the book in Beerbohm’s delicate voice.1 The sixth man was born to oblivious parents named Brown living in London’s Ladbroke Crescent. Between them they had four tin ears: deaf to the names that boys use as weapons, they called their son Ladbroke. In t­ hose days “schoolboys regarded the possession of any Christian name as rather unmanly,” the narrator recalls. “I was very prominent among his persecutors. Trafalgar Brown, Tottenham Court Brown, Bond Brown—­what names did we ­little brutes not cull from the London Directory?” Years passed. The tormented child became a government clerk and a moonlight scholar. He studied for art’s sake—to write a play. Imagining Sardanapalus as a tragic hero and looking him up in the Britannica, he spotted an entry nearby on Savonarola. The rest was literary history for Savonarola Brown—­sketched by Beerbohm (Figure 9), whose caricatures are jewels, like his sentences.2 276



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Figure 9. ​“Savonarola Brown,” Max Beerbohm, 1919.

“This sketch is true enough to the appearances presented by Brown,” we are assured, and then we notice ‘Act II’ scribbled at the lower left. Despite this vis­i­ble evidence, the hapless narrator explains that “the scrawled ‘Act I’ . . . ​suggests . . . ​a time when Brown confided to me that Act I of his play was finished, . . . ​­towards the end of 1901.” Savonarola: A

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Tragedy unfolds in the Florence of 1490. The stage directions are small razors. They lacerate Robert Browning, George Eliot, Walter Pater, and ­others who expropriated Italy’s Re­nais­sance to edify the En­glish. The play opens in a Room in the Monastery of San Marco, Florence, . . . ​a summer morning. Enter the Sa c r ist a n and a Fr ia r .

The sacristan worries that Savonarola looks more grim to-­day than ever. . . . I often won­der if some ­woman’s face, seen at some rout in his worldling days, haunts him e’en now, e’en ­here, and urges him to fierier fury ’gainst the Florentines.

Another friar, incredulous, has no fear: Savonarola love-­sick! Ha, ha, ha! . . .’Tis a goodly jest! The confirm’d misogyny a ladies’ man! . . . ​Hist! He comes. Enter Sav ona r ol a , rapt in thought. Give thee good morrow, ­Brother,

says the friar, and Savonarola curtly returns the greeting, releasing a waterfall of meta­phors. Then enter Luc r ezia Borg ia , St. Fr a nc is of Assisi and Leona r do da Vinc i. Luc r ezia is thickly veiled. This is the place,

says the Saint. Lucrezia, pointing to Savonarola, continues, and this the man! [Aside] And I— by the hot blood that courses in my veins I swear it ineluctably—­t he ­woman!

But a veil hides Lucrezia’s face. Savonarola, puzzled, asks



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who is this wanton?

The question scandalizes Saint Francis: Hush, sir! ’Tis my l­ ittle ­sister the poisoner, right well-­belov’d by all whom she hath as yet spared. . . . She . . . desireth to have word of thee anent some ­matter that befrets her.

Savonarola has been hasty, Leonardo warns, but the Prior refuses to speak to Lucrezia, who exits scorned, befretted, and enraged. Her destination is the setting of Act II, a l aboratory where apprentices distill poisons and where Savonarola comes to confess his passion. He trades reversals and reproaches with Lucrezia ­until the Act ends with the poisoner swearing vengeance again. Act III opens in a piazza, soon to be graced by the city’s good and g­ reat, each more recognizable than the last—­except ­those wearing masks. As Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici enter with ­faces covered, lesser mortals have already packed the square from end to end with a vast seething crowd that is drawn entirely from the lower ­orders. . . . ​Cobblers predominate.

A cobbler warns Lorenzo that ­today, as yesterday, Savonarola ­will let loose his thunder against . . . . . . ​t he New Learning and on all the art ­later than Giotto.

The crowd shouts for Savonarola’s death, but Lor enzo holds up his hand and gradually imposes silence,

telling the mob that the Prior’s twin bug-­bears are yourselves and that New Learning which I hold less dear than only you. . . .

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As Savonarola enters, the crowd makes a n oise for which even the best zoologists might not find a g ood comparison. ἀ e staves and bill-­hooks wave like twigs in a storm. . . . ​He is, however, unharmed and unruffled

as he climbs the steps of a loggia to address the rabble, quickly inciting them to scream for Lorenzo’s head—­a lthough it is the toxic Lucrezia that the Prior wants to eliminate. She enters carry­ing a poisoned ring and off ers it to Savonarola, but a Borgia Fool warns him, wear not the ring, it hath an unkind sting, ding, dong, ding. . . . Sav ona r ol a throws ring in Luc r ezia’s face. Enter Pope Jul ius II, with Papal army. . . . ​Re-­enter Guelfs and Ghibbelines fighting. . . . ​Enter Mic h a el Angel o. Andr ea de l Sa rt o appears for a moment at a win­ dow. Pippa passes. . . . ​Enter Bocc a c c io, Ben v en ut o Cel l ini and many o­ thers, making remarks highly characteristic of themselves. . . .

For Brown’s audience—­and Beerbohm’s readers—­the characteristic remarks w ­ ere well domesticated, familiar in E ­ ngland just ­after the ­Great War. Jokes about Pippa and a Faultless Painter could work only ­because En­glish readers had seen so many poems, novels, and plays crammed with Pico’s contemporaries and saturated with images of his Italy, by then regularly on display in London and the counties. Had t­ here been no Re­nais­ sance recognizable enough to ridicule, the next phase of Pico’s ­career in modern Anglophonia—­his Assumption into the college curriculum—­ would have been a duller miracle.3 To start the second act of his play, Savonarola Brown dressed the stage as Lucrezia’s Laboratory. Retorts, test-­tubes, ­etc. On a s mall Re­nais­sance ­table . . . ​is a ­great poison-­bowl.

Only a hundred years e­ arlier, no one could have written this last sentence ­because no furniture in E ­ ngland, physical or m ­ ental, was yet labeled ‘re­nais­sance.’ The En­glish word was acquiring its pre­sent sense, more or less, by the mid-1830s, reflecting ­earlier uses in French. A ­century before, however, En­glish authors ­were already writing in Latin about a postmedieval rebirth of culture. Humphrey Hody—­a clergyman whose book was



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about Famous Greeks who came to Italy at that time—­described a recovery in the ­fourteenth ­century “when finer lit­er­a­ture began to be reborn (renasci) in Italy, the Latin language started to be refined . . . ​and in the same region Greek letters began to revive.” But this literary and philological rebirth— in 1859 Voigt would call it a Revival (Wiederbelebung) of Classical Antiquity—­was a resurrection for specialists, not the wider awakening celebrated by Michelet and Burckhardt. In Voigt’s time, Matthew Arnold still preferred ‘Renascence’ to ‘Re­nais­sance,’ “a foreign word . . . ​destined to become of more common use.” 4 New Boxloads of data about Pico’s Renaissance—­missing from Thomas More’s Lyfe—­crossed the Channel a­ fter 1773 when Nicolaas ten Hove, a Dutch politician and cultural impresario, wrote in French about the Medici. In 1797 Sir Richard Clayton brought out an En­glish translation of ­these very rare Mémoires généalogiques de la Maison de Médicis. Clayton’s version described Pico’s friendship with Lorenzo in just a few sentences. He found the prince’s reputation inflated but allowed that his gifts ­were remarkable: only cynics could belittle his feats of memory. And he was “the first who raised his voice against the follies of judicial astrology,” though he did nothing e­ lse worth mentioning. “De ente et uno is no longer read,” according to Clayton’s version, “and the world does not suff er by its slumbers.” The Oration was not even obsolete: the En­glish Memoirs never mention it.5 While Clayton was translating Ten Hove, William Roscoe was finishing his Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, published in 1796. Roscoe was a businessman who went to Parliament for Liverpool, though his heart was in books, paintings, and philanthropy: in politics he fought the slave trade. He also taught himself the classics in order to write about Erasmus. That proj­ect was never completed, but his book on Lorenzo made the Italian Re­nais­ sance accessible and attractive in En­glish. Lorenzo became a b est-­seller, often translated, revised, and reissued in a dozen or more editions: Lord Landsdowne, himself a collector of art, praised it in the House of Lords. For another admirer of this readable book, the author’s talents made “the accounts of Pico della Mirandola . . . ​cease to appear incredible.” Like Ten Hove, Roscoe came to Pico through Lorenzo to stay only briefly. He described the prince’s deathbed visit to the Magnifico but said nothing about the Oration and left the attack on astrology for a footnote. He defended Pico against Voltaire, however, and against the “Romish prelates” who provoked him to write the Apology. His plan to debate in Rome was only an “ebullition of youthful vanity,” and the loss of his poems was

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la­men­ta­ble, said Roscoe, who regretted that “he turned his astonishing acquisitions to so ­little account.” 6 He and other writers of this period made biographies out of published letters. Meiners used this epistolary method, and Ritter applied it to the history of philosophy. For an increasingly literate—­yet Latinless—­public, amateur scholars like Roscoe translated old documents and stitched them into narratives. Another diligent researcher was William Greswell, an Anglican curate who taught school near Manchester. He cited Roscoe’s Lorenzo and Clayton’s Ten Hove on the first page of his own Memoirs of Re­nais­sance poets and scholars—in a s econd edition that added a P ico biography of more than 200 pages to eight other lives. This is Greswell on ­earlier writing about Pico: Of the compilers of brief and fugitive ‘elogia’ during the lapse of several centuries, many relying on . . . ​t heir pre­de­ces­sors have assigned to Picus an honorable nich . . . ​[among] the shades of departed literary heroes. By most he has been extolled in general terms as the miracle of his age. . . . ​Some have overstepped the bounds of probability and truth. . . . ​ No attempt seems hitherto to have been made ­towards a regular account of his life, if we except the brief and unsatisfactory production of his nephew . . . ​[which] is ­little more than an enthusiastic panegyric on the religious and moral character of his u ­ ncle, . . . ​[dwelling] on such superstitious particulars as . . . ​a more enlightened age would . . . ​pass over.

Greswell excavated many Pico Boxes, including the one in Giovio’s Elogia, to supplement the letters and Gianfrancesco’s Vita. The concluding paragraph of his biography allows that Pico “merits admiration . . . ​[for] the powers and capabilities of the h ­ uman mind.” He ranks among the “literary . . . ​comets and meteors,” and flashes of brilliance are Greswell’s key finding, not any par­tic­u­lar deed. Pico was now a celebrity in ­England for being celebrated. Roscoe had come to Pico from Lorenzo, and Greswell came from Poliziano: he was attracted to both scholars by their Latin letters. He sought to improve on Gianfrancesco’s “sombrous and partial portrait,” the work of “a tasteless scholastic or a m isguided enthusiast,” and also to do better than Thomas More’s “antiquated and now almost forgotten work.” He saw his advantage as a new method: “recognizing Picus as his own biographer” in his letters, then comparing them with other correspondence of the era—­



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like Poliziano’s—to dig up buried information. The excavating seemed productive, “even though the merits of this long-­extolled prodigy of lit­er­a­ ture fall somewhat short.”7 Greswell gave Pico mixed marks. Rejecting astrology was right, but he was wrong to punish his own body with “pains which the erring judgment of t­ hose times considered as meritorious.” His only real accomplishment was “the restoration of oriental lit­er­a­ture.” Recondite learning was all well and good. But what about religion? ­There Pico went astray, mixing “Platonism in his theological writings” with “fancied doctrines” of Kabbalah. ­A fter spending a fortune on Hebrew books, he “discovered in them a strong confirmation of the chief mysteries of Chris­t ian­ity”—­except that he was “ignorant of the real doctrines of the Jewish Cabala.” He bought fake manuscripts in a “fraud practiced upon [his] . . . ​credulity.” 8 The shame was not just one bad purchase: Pico’s blunders ­were habitual. Deep error mars the Oration, which is “an allegorical frenzy.” “Sentiments of the most dignified kind are h ­ ere debased by . . . ​illusions of Platonism and . . . ​sources still more visionary and remote. The rites of heathen worship, the my­thol­ogy and mysteries of Egypt and Greece, the dreams of Mahometism and the poetical rhapsodies of remotest times are herein represented as concurring with revelation. . . . ​By ­those . . . ​vain babblings . . . ​ the youthful fancy of Picus was doubtless led astray.” Nonetheless, despite the madness in the speech, Pico’s proj­ect was not whimsical. His “bold design” to stage a d isputation “on the most con­spic­u­ous theater of the world” was purposeful: “However extravagant his proj­ect, however it might partake of the spirit of literary chivalry, he was not . . . ​actuated by any sudden or capricious impulse. His plan was deliberately formed and matured. . . . ​ His nine hundred ‘Conclusiones’ might suffice to convince the reader; but yet further testimony may be found in his oration ‘De hominis dignitate.’ ” The Conclusions—900 of them—­convinced Greswell that Pico was serious. He said nothing about their content, however, and only a ­little about the Apology. Then he gave fourteen pages to the Oration, excerpting several long passages. He noted that the speech “was made public a­ fter the decease of the author, . . . ​[though] Picus himself . . . ​would prob­ably have refused his consent”—or should have done since the Oration promoted the “vain babblings” that ruined his theology. Greswell learned about Pico’s wish to suppress the speech from Gianfrancesco’s headnote to the letters and minor works.9

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Equipped with this information—­after a h ostile appraisal of Pico’s theology—­Greswell was ready for the speech’s first lines, “an exordium . . . ​ calculated by its novelty and importance to command attention.” This part of the Oration rejected “arguments generally alleged in favour of the dignity of h ­ uman nature,” and Greswell made no other comment on the topic while paraphrasing God’s address to Adam. Then he summarized “that progressive course of discipline through which the mind must necessarily pass” and which is “inculcated in the institutions of Moses.” Next he translated the reasons that “impelled me [Pico] to the study of philosophy” and to examine all the schools—­before restating the rest of the speech. ­There was no freedom and almost no dignity, even though he used the title De hominis dignitate.10 Greswell enlarged his Memoirs in 1805 with this account of Pico ­because he was encouraged by responses to the previous edition of 1801. But a second try was the end of the road for his book. In 1824 the Retrospective Review, a periodical specializing in older publications, called the Memoirs a w aste of time, “careless and unmethodical.” Greswell’s book was not the anonymous reviewer’s assignment, however: his task was an essay on Kabbalah, starting with works by Gaff arel, Henry More, Postel, and Pico. The result—­including a n ote on Greswell—­was misinformed mockery of “Rabbinical deliramenta,” adding new blunders to Voltaire’s errors. According to the Review, Pico “bartered an Italian principality for a schoolman’s gown,” and his “attachment to the Cabala was entirely owing to his zeal for the Romish church.” This papist attachment was to Jewish “humbug.”11 Reckless nonsense and wicked popery again: although Greswell was too polite for invective as harsh as his reviewer’s, he too saw Pico as a Schwärmer, as Buhle and Dreydorff would also see him—­good Protestants all. In 1805, with the Napoleonic Wars raging, what ­else could Reverend Greswell observe, peering across the Channel at Italian priestcraft? ­Later, however, fires of revolution would rekindle Pico’s fame, and the prince would carry a torch of liberty—­even before Burckhardt could be read in En­glish. A few Italians had been told by Ricardo Bartoli that the prince was a liberator. But who put a progressive new Pico on stage for an Anglophone audience? Not crusaders like Bartoli or phi­los­o­phers or even historians, for the most part, but novelists, paint­ers, poets, and critics. One critic, Walter Pater, stood out as Pico’s most eff ective En­glish promoter in the eyes of James Rigg, a Methodist barrister who turned to lit­er­a­ture.



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Introducing a deluxe edition of Thomas More’s Lyfe in 1890, Rigg sized the prince up as one of ­t hose writers whose personality ­w ill always count for a ­great deal more than their works. . . . ​Few ­w ill ever care to follow his ­eager spirit through the labyrinths of recondite speculation. . . . ​Pico figures in a dim and ever dimmer way in the older histories of philosophy from Stanley . . . ​to Hegel, who dismisses him . . . ​in a few lines. . . . ​Most En­glishmen prob­ably owe such interest as he excites in them to Mr.  Pater’s charming sketch . . . ​or the slighter notices in Mr.  J.  A. Symonds’ Re­nais­sance in Italy or Mr. Seebohm’s Oxford Reformers.

In Frederic Seebohm’s book on Erasmus, More, and John Colet, the prince was the morose saint of More’s Lyfe—­and a model for earnest reformers. ­After citing verses from Pico’s devotional works about “filthy sin” in “this deadly life,” Seebohm praised his “enlightened piety and . . . ​heroic example.”12 Seebohm, a banker who wrote history, was a devout Quaker. Symonds, a poet and critic, professed no religion but defended homo­sexuality in the first En­glish account of its history. His derivative but engaging study of the Re­nais­sance attracted many readers. Its seven volumes began to appear in 1875, just before Burckhardt’s essay came out in En­glish. Symonds wrote lively, pointed prose. Critical, ­free, liberal, secular, and tolerant are his descriptions of the “transition from the M ­ iddle Ages to the Modern World.” Other favorites are energy, humanism, in­de­pen­dence, individuality, intellectual liberty, liberty of judgment, originality, pro­gress, and self-­ conscious freedom. His Re­nais­sance was an “emancipation of the reason” and a “new birth to liberty.” Freedom came when the recovered classics released Italy from her medieval bondage by ennobling the concept of humanity—­treated ­until then as a “diseased excrescence on the world.” Breaking through the old “cloistral” gloom, ­people learned at last to love God’s creation in a “religion of science and the reason.” Sometimes their learning was “crude and pedantic,” Symonds complained, or “infantine and pompous.” Finding a better “faith of culture” was the mission of the Platonic Acad­emy, guided by the genius of Ficino and Pico.13 To sketch Pico’s c­ areer, Symonds stayed close to Gianfrancesco’s Vita. Advantages of birth, body, and mind made the prince a “sublime ideal of humanity” but inclined him to “love and amusements” ­until he grew up to “greater austerity.” His learning was livelier than the usual dry-­as-­dust

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scholarship. “Asiatic fancies, Alexandrian myths, Christian doctrines and Hebrew traditions” led him to the “hybrid mysticism” of Kabbalah, a deplorable error that made it “impossible to reject magic.” He refuted the astrologers, however. Pico’s criticisms of the stargazers, along with his regard for f­ ree ­will and choice, moved Symonds to Jacobin ecstasies of praise for the prince as a s cientific rationalist. His freethinking—­timelessly expressed in the Oration—­was ragged but energetic. The speech was an “epiphany of the modern spirit. . . . ​Out of thoughts like t­ hese, if Italy could only have been f­ ree . . . ​ [and] uncorrupted, . . . ​might have sprung . . . ​the noblest growth of ­human science.” But the virus of the Counter-­Reformation infected the Italian soul. Other­wise Pico would have started a “school of philosophy second to none.”14 Symonds added detail, drama, and counter-­Victorian attitude to his expansion of Burckhardt’s subtler essay. In a much smaller essay on Pico, published in a scandalous book, Walter Pater ignored Burckhardt. Calling his proj­ect ἀ e Re­nais­sance, he began in 1866 when a biography of Winckelmann made him curious about the latest revival of classical art. He read German philosophy in a s erious way, but he wrote mainly about Italian paint­ers: Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, the School of Giorgione. The allure of this material and the author’s supple prose attracted readers, despite shock from Oxford clerics at a conclusion—­suppressed in the second edition but then restored—­that substituted sensual experience for conventional values. “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end,” Pater exclaimed. “A counted number of pulses only is given to us. . . . ​To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”15 Pater’s aestheticism colored his portrait of Pico, whose flame had also burned bright and quick. A full biography was not Pater’s proj­ect, though he referred to More’s Lyfe. He described an encounter between Pico and Ficino whose result was formidably abstract—­a translation of Plotinus. But the desired ele­ments of the episode in Pater’s story ­were concrete and visual—­Pico pictured first as “in outward form . . . ​an image of . . . ​inward harmony and completeness,” then as Ficino’s vision of a “young man, not unlike the archangel Raphael, as the Florentines of that age depicted him in his wonderful walk with Tobit, or Mercury, as he might have appeared in a painting by Sandro Botticelli or Piero di Cosimo.” This apparition—­“­there was something not wholly earthly about him”—­ communed with pagan gods as if they would speak to Christians, who could then take comfort from their oracles. Pico honored “the old gods,”



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Pater claimed, “one of the last who seriously and sincerely entertained the claim on men’s faith of the pagan religions.” Trading on symbols and allegories passed down from Moses through Homer to Plato, the prince worked a miracle that was “feebler”—­because it was not pictorial or sensual—­than the marvel seen in Re­nais­sance paintings: paganism reconciled with Chris­ tian­ity. In passing, Pater mentioned Kabbalah and astrology but said nothing about magic. The won­der was all in appearances. All the magic was on the surface.16 Without benefit of Burckhardt’s restatement of the Oration, Pater missed a point about freedom and choice that ­others took from the speech. Mankind gets “high dignity” not by ranging through all levels of creation, said Pater, but from placement within the cosmos as its microcosm, a nobler analog of other grades of being and an image of God. The Pico who valued mankind so much was a “ true humanist,” and the “essence of humanism is . . . ​that nothing which has ever interested living men and ­women can wholly lose its vitality, . . . ​nothing about which they have ever been passionate.” In 1873, Pater’s conception of Pico was still romantic: this unfinished, magnetic genius could attract almost any adjective; “he became his admirers,” as Auden would say about Yeats.17

2. ​The Italy of Savonarola Brown Pico had a new stage to speak from ­after En­glish artists and intellectuals turned from Gothic phantasmagoria and nostalgic medievalism to other distorted enthusiasms about the Italian Re­nais­sance. An exciting trend in dreamscapes had started with Horace Walpole’s ­Castle of Otranto, a Gothic Story, when Greswell was a boy. Otranto sits in the heel of Italy’s boot, but the overstated landscape of Gothic fiction was a c raggy Transylvania, haunted and shadowy, not a sunny South. Stock characters—­ruthless bandits, spineless priests, virginal heroines—­had less depth than the scenery of ruined abbeys, damp dungeons, and tall towers. Tales of this make-­ believe Italy had a long run from Walpole’s ­Castle in 1764 through Anne Radcliff e’s Mysteries of Udolpho thirty years l­ater.18 A more sedate medievalism—­recoiling from industrial ugliness and urban cruelty—­was in decline by 1846 when (the younger) William Hazlitt introduced a pirated edition of Roscoe’s Life of Lorenzo as the first off ering (dedicated to Prime Minister Peel) of a “Eu­ro­pean Library Intended to Elevate the National Mind.” Elsewhere Hazlitt mentioned translating Roscoe’s

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Latin notes into En­glish but cutting his criticisms of J. C. L. Sismondi, judging them to be “of no interest whatever”—­though some En­glish readers had found t­ hese disputes with Sismondi timely. The Swiss Romantic’s History of Italian Republics in the ­Middle Ages attacked Roscoe for making too much of Lorenzo and too ­little of ordinary Italians, especially citizens of the medieval communes that enriched Italy—­according to Sismondi.19 This feud aired a g rievance of medievalism: that p ­ eople thrived in Christian communities u ­ ntil Re­nais­sance despots crushed them. A related protest was aesthetic and religious: the bad art of the Re­nais­sance poisoned the ­human spirit that medieval builders and carvers had nourished. In 1836 Augustus Welby Pugin pictorialized this indictment in a s tunning ­ ourteenth book, Contrasts: Or a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the F and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Pre­sent Day, Shewing the Pre­sent Decay of Taste. Pugin charged that E ­ ngland’s monasteries had been destroyed in a “fatal period” by the “degenerate spirit” of heresy; then the neo-­pagan corruption spread to modern times from what we now call the Re­nais­sance. A new edition of Contrasts in 1841 introduced the key term with a complaint, still treating it as a French word—­“the ­grand re­nais­ sance, or revival of classical art, which moderns so highly extol in preference to the glorious works . . . ​of the ­middle ages.”20 A few years l­ater, Thomas Carlyle (echoing Sismondi) argued that the decay was also moral and po­liti­cal: memories of medieval monasticism shamed the ­England of the Corn Laws, where “man’s duty to man reduces itself to handing him certain metal coins.” Walter Scott, when he was not making border wars romantic, produced happier propaganda for the ­Middle Ages with Ivanhoe, ἀ e Talisman, and other high-­minded adventure tales. Fantasies provoked counter-­fantasies. Starting in the 1840s, to challenge Scott and other nostalgists, came Robert Browning, George Eliot, and the Pre-­Raphaelite Brotherhood with longings of their own. Painting, poetry, and the novel—­amplified by commentary from Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin—­created the culture in which Walter Pater would need only one word, ‘Re­nais­sance,’ to sell his book.21 Browning’s and Eliot’s generation made Italy sunnier and friendlier than the dark Gothic terrain—­exotic and uncanny. Some creators of this new Victorian art lived in Italy in order to cultivate an En­glish audience, sending home thoughts from abroad that adapted a foreign land to domestic expectations. They constructed a shared sense of humanity to redeem the peninsula from pagans and papists and, eventually, to build Chiantishire in



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green and pleasant Tuscany. Plays, poems, and novels first; then expatriate colonies; ­later, a­ fter World War II, villas to lease. The poet Browning came early and stayed long. He became a l ocal monument in Florence and an icon at home even before he was installed in Westminster Abbey. Among poets only Tennyson was his peer. Never sentimental about the M ­ iddle Ages, he also went hard on the Re­nais­sance. Sometimes he sounds like Pugin, blaming neo-­pagan aesthetes for infecting Christendom and softening it up for a plague of Puritans. But t­ hose who got the worst of Browning’s rigor w ­ ere his own characters, who breathe real air in his poems: their sins, like mine and yours, are all too h ­ uman.22 In 1841 Browning unveiled an En­g lish Italy in Pippa Passes, a closet drama with patches of unforgettable verse written by a poet in his twenties, a­ fter a first voyage to Italy in 1838. The time is con­temporary and the place is Asolo, north of Padua. The tiny town gave its name to Gli Asolani, dialogues on love that Pietro Bembo wrote during an interlude with Lucrezia Borgia. The action takes only a day—­a holiday for Pippa, who roams through Asolo, singing. Young and sinless, she lives among Gothic freaks: killers, pimps, whores, womanizing men, man-­eating w ­ omen, and priests too burned-­out to notice. She works in a silk mill, owned by Ottima’s husband. But Ottima lusts for a foreigner—­Sebald. As soon as the adulterers kill Ottima’s husband, Sebald regrets the crime. Yet Ottima thinks that she and Sebald have been “magnificent in sin”—­ripe for Gothic melodrama. Browning went his own way, however, writing new rules for lyric drama. This is Ottima tormenting Sebald: ott ima  ​Crown me your queen, your spirit’s arbitress, magnificent in sin. Say that! seba l d I crown you my ­great white queen, my spirit’s arbitress, magnificent. . . . [From without is heard the voice of Pippa, singing— ἀ e year’s at the spring and day’s at the morn; morning’s at seven; the hill-­side’s dew-­pearled; the lark’s on the wing;

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[Pippa passes. seba l d ​God’s in his heaven! Do you hear that?

Pippa Passes: ​a minor play with one of the g­ reat turnings in the history of drama. When young ­women come close to young men in Italy, ­people expect a ‘ thunderbolt’—­not at all what Sebald feels; he senses nothing erotic. Yet Pippa’s song fulminates as the girl blows by Sebald like a sacramental wind. “God’s in his heaven! Do you hear that? ” Being passed by Pippa gives Sebald a glimpse of redemption, ­until remorse paralyzes him and he sinks into suicide. Forty years l­ater, Nietz­sche announced that God too was dead. But in 1841, for Browning’s readers, Christ had not ­stopped short of Asolo. Even in his despair, Sebald realizes that the “­little peasant’s voice has righted all again. Though I be lost, . . . ​God’s in his heaven.” His “brain is drowned,” however, and his thoughts are a whirl­pool. By himself, swimming in sin and fear, he can make no sense of anything. Only God’s presence could rescue him, and no creature can be saved alone—­even a ­giant personality like Ottima. Without God, no world is safe for anyone.23 Browning’s rebuke to romantic loners comes when Pippa passes Sebald. But in the Dramatic Lyr­ics of 1842—­the next pamphlet ­after Pippa Passes in the same series—­Browning opened a gallery of individualists and revisited them throughout his ­career. Some ­were already celebrities, like Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter. ­Others, like the duke in “My Last Duchess,” ­were Browning’s fictions. Like the worthies of Giovio’s Elogia, they have names, deeds, and (sometimes) ­faces. And they have something ­else that none of Pico’s admirers had yet put in a Box—­personality. The Dramatic Lyr­ics capture personalities in a few lines. As Browning mastered this new form, the notion of celebrity evolved in Victorian lit­er­a­ture and culture: a name, a face, and deeds ­were no longer enough to make a reputation. To be modern celebrities, p ­ eople would need personalities. Many have stood near the duke in his hall, watching and listening as he describes his duchess, “painted on the wall, looking as if she ­were alive.” The duke may be Alfonso II of Ferrara, who died in 1598. But history counts less than the personalities who speak whenever the poem is read.



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The same goes for other persons resurrected or in­ven­ted by Browning in sketches of medieval and postmedieval Italy. Like Browning himself, some are self-­aware artists: Filippo Lippi, for example. O ­ thers are self-­absorbed intellectuals, erudite like Pico. A b ishop o ­ rders his tomb. Colleagues remember a grammarian at his funeral—­“shortly ­after the revival of learning in Eu­rope.”24 The pedant speaks through his pallbearers, who recall his character; their faded friend died perplexed by hoti, in Greek a three-­letter word (ὅτι) that needs just the right breathing and accent: Ground he at grammar; still, thro’ the rattle, parts of speech w ­ ere rife; while he could stammer, he settled hoti’s business.

The bishop, fussing about his tomb and the message it would send, ­orders workmen to carve my epitaph aright, choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s e­ very word, no gaudy ware.25

The critic Ruskin said this in 1856 about Browning’s poem on the bishop: “I know of no other piece of modern En­glish prose or poetry in which ­there is so much told, as in t­ hese lines, of the Re­nais­sance spirit—­its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hy­poc­risy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I h ave said of the central Re­nais­sance in thirty pages of the Stones of Venice, put into as many lines, Browning’s also being the antecedent work.” Ruskin was right: Browning evoked the “Re­nais­sance spirit” like no one before him. But out of this era—­“crowded with culture” in the poet’s words—­came the “evil of the Re­nais­sance” that the critic denounced. Browning saw evil t­ here too: his old grammarian was “dead from the waist down” before he died. How could the virginal Ruskin object? Browning objected, however, taking life as it was: even a withered grammarian deserved good rhymes, and the poet wanted “to be only a yes-­sayer”—­like Nietz­sche. In a cooler voice, this was also Arnold’s message in Culture and Anarchy, preferring Hellenism to Hebraism, spontaneous intellect to righ­ teous conduct, and the ‘Renascence’ to the Reformation—­not to speak of

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the M ­ iddle Ages. ­These ­were the healthier choices, Arnold thought, tonic for the soul’s medieval sickness, and he rejected Ruskin’s diagnosis of a distinctly modern disease infecting the Renaissance—­prideful individualism aggravated by pagan sensuality.26 Ruskin never could decide where to put dissolute Re­nais­sance art. In writings from the 1870s, he started his list of flawed Italian paintings ­after 1520. Once Tintoretto failed at emulating Michelangelo, all was lost. At one point he certified “fifty years of perfect work,” setting the limits of an Age of the Masters between 1450 and 1500—­Pico’s half-­century—to include Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Giovanni Cima, Bernardino Luini, Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Perugino, the early Raphael, and Andrea del Verrocchio. But this period antedates Raphael as a f orce in his own right. Still in Perugino’s orbit, he was only seventeen in 1500—­the year of his first commission—­but then lived twenty years more, time enough to make post-­Raphaelite trou­ble.27 A Pre-­Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) of paint­ers and poets—­eventually boosted by Ruskin—­first gathered in 1848. During the next year, John Millais made one of the first pictures marked ‘PRB,’ Lorenzo and Isabella, ­after a Boccaccio story retold by Keats (Figure  10). In eff ect, Millais painted characters for a play that only Browning could have written, and no one would have dated the pictures or the poetry to the Quattrocento. Yet t­ here they ­were: believable Re­nais­sance ­people, sitting around a ­table like your cousins or mine—­only better to look at and better spoken (as they talked in Browning’s poems) as well as homicidal. Before the meal, the thugs on the left side of the t­ able ­will have said grace—no impediment to the murder they w ­ ere planning. But sympathy for Italianate religion was scarce in Protestant ­England, scarcer still ­after 1845 when John Henry Newman went over to Rome. A ­ fter the turmoil of 1848, however, En­glish idealism about Italian politics brought more readers to Browning and more viewers to the PRB. While ­these paint­ers depicted an imaginary Italy, the En­glish ­were finding it easier to look at real Italian pictures—­collected, captioned, and criticized. Books on art by Anna Jameson, Lord Alexander Lindsay, and Alexis Rio ­were also tracts about religion and public morality. “To elevate the national mind”—­the aim of the series that pirated Roscoe’s Lorenzo in 1846—­became the National Gallery’s mission of “ennobling enjoyment” in 1857. The Gallery’s trustees de­cided to show more Quattrocento art to more visitors—­nearly a million annually by 1859: buying less Guido Reni was paying off .28



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Figure 10. ​Lorenzo and Isabella, John Millais, 1849.

“Fra Lippo Lippi’s round-­cheeked adoring angels” hover over a scene in George Eliot’s Romola. “A young faun modelled . . . ​by a promising youth named Michelangelo” decorates another episode. Romola—­not Eliot’s most admired book—­still sells. It first appeared serially in Cornhill magazine, with illustrations by Frederic Leighton, who befriended the Pre-­ Raphaelites and knew Florence even better than Eliot. When Elizabeth Barrett Browning died t­ here in 1861, Leighton designed her tomb for the En­glish cemetery. Why Elizabeth’s husband loved Romola is easy to see: the novel carried on his work of bringing a bygone Italy within ­England’s pre­sent. Realism is the book’s strength, achieved by dense detail, deep background, and the constant presence of historical figures—­sometimes entering the action, sometimes just mentioned by fictional characters made real by t­ hese historical ­people. When Savonarola preached, Romola fell u ­ nder his spell. But Piero di Cosimo painted her as Ariadne, and Machiavelli gossiped with her husband. The studious Eliot found thinkers as fascinating as artists. Romola introduced the En­g lish to Alberti, Argyropoulos, Bruni, Demetrios

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Chalcondylas, Manuel Chrysoloras, Ficino, Francesco Filelfo, Landino, Poggio, Poliziano, Pontano, Traversari, and Valla. Eliot set her novel between Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death in 1492 and Savonarola’s execution in 1498. Pico—­whom she names seven times—­died in 1494.29 Machiavelli went to Nello’s barbershop. Tito—­Romola’s unreliable husband and one of Nello’s regulars—­was an eye-­catching stranger. Nello promised Tito a haircut that would make him look “not unlike the illustrious prince Pico . . . ​in his prime”—as if the prince ­were past his prime in 1492, which may have been true. Nello gossiped with Tito, letting him know that “our Phoenix, the incomparable Pico, has shown that horoscopes are all a nonsensical dream”—­though in 1492 no one could have read what Pico would soon say in print about astrology. Eliot’s job was not to get the story straight but to tell it well, as she did, introducing Cronaca (Simone Pollaiuolo) to tell the boys in the barbershop that “Pico and Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino . . . ​reverence Fra Girolamo”—­which was not true for Ficino, at least privately.30 On November  17, 1494, as Savonarola finished preaching, someone raced through the piazza in front of the Duomo. “The mystic poet Girolamo Benivieni [was] hastening, perhaps, to carry tidings of the beloved Frate’s speedy coming to his friend Pico . . . ​, who was never to see the light of another morning.” A crowd scene locates Benivieni in ­human space. He was a m inor celebrity with a na me, deeds, and maybe even a f ace. Eliot added a ­little personality: he rushes, he makes haste. She visualized his location: that’s him ­running down the steps of the Duomo. To heighten the poet’s celebrity, she made his place picturable—­like Persepolis for Tamburlaine, Sherwood Forest for Robin Hood, or Metropolis for Superman: unforgettable locales and memorable personalities, not just names, deeds, and ­faces, to authenticate celebrity.31 Nello’s shop is a fictional place, populated as Eliot’s story progresses, more humanized and realized. Piero di Cosimo comes in one after­noon—­ later than usual, a week a­ fter the French entered Florence and Pico died. The city is still agitated. When Piero complains about Tito, Nello defends his bel erudito, a fine young man with a bright ­future in scholarship. “Florence ­can’t aff ord it,” the barber warns, “with her scholars moulting off her at the early age of forty. Our Phoenix Pico”—­who died at thirty-­one—­“ just gone straight to Paradise, as the Frate has informed us; and the incomparable Poliziano, not two months since, gone—­well, well, let us hope he is



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not gone to the eminent scholars in the Malebolge.’ ‘By the way,’ said Francesco Cei, ‘have you heard that Camilla Rucellai has outdone her Frate in prophecies? She prophesied two years ago that Pico would die in the time of the lilies . . . ​, the lilies of France.’ ” To find details about Pico and the clairvoyant Camilla, the novelist read Gianfrancesco’s Vita and other sources. By m arrying Rodolfo Rucellai, Camilla Bartolini had joined a ­family rich enough to pay Alberti to finish their palace in the Via della Vigna Nuova. Nearby, off Via della Scala, they also built a splendid garden. But in 1495, across town in San Marco, Savonarola and his b ­ rothers lured Rodolfo into celibacy—­for a w hile—­and Camilla did her husband one better by joining the Dominican tertiaries and staying with them.32 Eliot’s research was thorough, like her scene painting. She invited Tito to “a supper in the Rucellai Gardens” (see Figure 11), where a “bust of Plato had long been used to look down, . . . ​brought from Lorenzo’s villa ­after his death, when the meetings of the Platonic Acad­emy had been transferred to ­these gardens. Especially on e­ very thirteenth of November, reputed anniversary of Plato’s death, it had looked down from ­under laurel leaves on a picked com­pany of scholars and phi­los­o­phers, who met to eat and drink with moderation, and to discuss and admire, perhaps with less moderation, the doctrines of that g­ reat master.” Plato, the marble sage who presided over Alberti, Ficino, and Poliziano, had also gazed at “Pico, once a Quixotic young genius with long curls, astonished at his own powers, and astonishing Rome with heterodox t­ heses, afterwards a more h ­ umble student. . . . ​Bernardo Rucellai . . . ​as host and patron . . . ​welcomed Tito . . . ​ and gave him a p lace between Lorenzo Tornabuoni and Giannozzo Pucci, . . . ​accomplished young members of the Medici party.” Pieces of the prince’s story deadened by repetition—­his early genius, prideful sinning, and eventual penitence told and retold—­got new life when he came ­under Plato’s stony eyes in the Orti Oricellari. Pico had been dead for more than twenty years when Machiavelli had his celebrated talks ­there, but Eliot compressed the chronology. Meals ­imagined in the Gardens foreshadow Tito’s invitation to a real address, acquired by the Magnifico’s s­ ister’s husband in 1481. In this place—­tourists still walk ­there in a few minutes from Santa Maria Novella—­Tito assimilated Pico. Tito gave Pico personality; Pico admitted Tito to history: one beautiful boy helped another.33

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Figure 11. ​“A Supper in the Rucellai Gardens,” Frederic Leighton, 1863.

History authenticates fictions that make history au­t hen­t ic: this is the dialectic of historical storytelling. When fictional characters talk to historical persons and walk in their world, the characters seem real. Likewise, historical figures are engaging if we know their inner thoughts and private motives, if we can read them like characters in a novel. When Nello compares Tito to “the illustrious Prince Pico,” Tito gains a l­ ittle real­ity. As Bernardo Rucellai’s guest, Pico has visited the Gardens, and Tito lends him some personality. Transactions between ­actual and fictional persons happen out of time but in real places—­a lso in unreal places like Nello’s shop. All are sights to be i­ magined. But a fictional site ­will be easier to imagine if a skilled novelist is the proprietor. In chapter ­after chapter, Eliot filled Nello’s barbershop with customers that many readers have wanted to meet. Florentine spaces crowded with Nello’s regulars ­were as credible as the settings of Silas Marner, Adam Bede, and Middlemarch, stories set by Eliot in the ­England of her own time, where many shared her experience. Like



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Browning, who studied chronicles to write poems, Eliot had the instincts and per­sis­tence of a s cholar—­which she was—as well as philosophical insights. She translated Feuerbach and Spinoza. Other novelists of her day—­Edward Bulwer-­Lytton, G.  P.  R. James, Charles Reade, Emma Robinson—­took the same erudite road to tell tales about the Borgias, Cola di Rienzo, Erasmus, Leonardo, and Machiavelli. Not all t­ hese writers won lasting fame. Although Bulwer-­Lytton’s books ­were hugely popu­lar when he published them, his most remembered words—­ repeated ­today as ridicule—­open a forgotten novel on “a dark and stormy night.” But Eliot’s Florence became a place that Savonarola Brown could count on. Thomas Trollope, Anthony’s ­brother and just as prolific, lived in her Italy but died in E ­ ngland—as she did also. Reading Romola, he was “struck by the wonderful power . . . ​in ­every page of it” and the “rapidity with which she squeezed out the essence . . . ​of a most complex period of history.”34

3. ​Pictures of Pico Lured by novels and poems, some of the En­glish wanted to see the real Italy for themselves. In 1842 tourists could buy a new guidebook written (anonymously) by Francis Palgrave and published by John Murray to replace Travels in Italy by Mariana Starke, who died in 1838. In this period Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, Frances Trollope (­mother of Thomas and Anthony), and other writers ­were traveling to the peninsula and selling appreciations of their voyages. The full title of Starke’s Travels locates her ­earlier Italian voyages Between the Years 1792 and 1798, Containing a View of the Late Revolutions in ἀ at Country, Likewise Pointing Out the Matchless Works of Art. Stendahl observed that her book’s “twentieth edition . . . ​ indicates to the prudent En­glishman the price of a turkey, an apple, a glass of milk and so on.”35 More and more p ­ eople needed practical advice once the G ­ rand Tour, disrupted by the French Revolution, gave way to Karl Baedeker, whose customers ­were the self-­reliant and their families, not milords with servants trailing ­behind. A ­ fter Karl died in 1859, his heirs put the guides out in En­glish and updated them with Murray’s formulas. Small places like Mirandola ­were challenging: Italians get lost driving ­there even ­today. In 1661 an En­glish diarist ­going north to Mantua and Verona passed near the ­little town without describing it at all. The section on the Modena region in Murray’s first edition of 1842 also took no notice: Mirandola was still too hard to find—or

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not worth the eff ort. In the ­fourteenth edition of 1877, however, the town of the “celebrated Pico” rated a short look: “the Cathedral, the Church of Gesu and the Ducal Palace are worth seeing”—if not for long.36 The same party that passed Pico’s town without comment in 1661 had spent a month in Florence seeing “many rare sights.” The church of San Marco, designed by Michelozzo, was still a sure draw in that city for readers of Murray’s first Handbook. Top billing went to paintings by Bronzino, Fra Angelico, and Giotto, but the church’s “principal sepulchral monuments” ­were also described. One was Pico’s epitaph in verse by Ercole Strozzi—­less prominent than other memorials in the church that “address themselves more to the eye than to the mind.” A s­ imple carved slab marks the place where “Giovanni Mirandola lies: the rest of him the Tagus knows, / the Ganges too, perhaps the Antipodes as well.” Strozzi’s verses, claiming worldwide fame for Pico, did not impress Palgrave, who remarked in the first Handbook that the prince’s memorial preserves “not his real reputation [but] the esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries.” To get his bearings on this long-­dead genius, he consulted scholars of his own time by way of Henry Hallam’s history of Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture, where the epitaph was printed in Latin.37 Hallam had raided Brucker, Buhle, and Meiners to fill a Pico Box with “credulity,” “enthusiasm,” “fancies,” “fraud,” and “spurious writings”—­but no dignity or freedom. Trying to temper the abuse (may ­t here always be an ­England), he concluded that the Phoenix was not to be “slightly passed over, though he may have left nothing which we could read with advantage. If we talk of the admirable Crichton, who is ­little better than a shadow and lives but in panegyric, so much superior and more wonderful a person as John Picus of Mirandola should not be forgotten.” Hallam’s phantom was not James Barrie’s savvy butler, a proto-­Jeeves in his 1902 comedy. James Crichton was a boy-­wonder from Scotland who served Italian princes and died young in 1582—­only twenty-­two, gone sooner to his grave than Pico. When romantic biography and fiction conjured up this wraith from the Re­nais­sance, the prince supplied the usual benchmarks, “the astonishing powers of his mind and versatility of his talents, . . . ​approached by none except Picus.” One scholar, applying Roscoe’s documentary method, certified “the posthumous celebrity of the Admirable Crichton.” Hallam treated the same tales not just as tall, however, but as proverbially implausible. If one prodigy’s fame was as shaky as another’s, dubious stories about Crichton made Pico’s exploits doubtful—in one of his more shaming



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moments since Voltaire’s tantrum. What Palgrave borrowed from Hallam was less damaging—­until he repeated the comparison with Crichton.38 The earnest En­glish had more reasons to buy Murray’s Handbooks than to read Romola, where Pico is less improbable. Like all travel guides, the Handbooks addressed both travelers and armchair tourists—­vicarious witnesses of the poetic puff ery in San Marco. Some visitors came in person, however, and a f ew stayed, as Florence grew from 114,000 souls in 1861 to 190,000 in 1900. Browning and Eliot had joined ­earlier cohorts of colonists—­arriving ­after Romantics of Shelley’s generation who disliked the locals. Bernard Berenson, Bertrand Russell, and Aby Warburg came ­later. The city of Eu­rope’s dreams—­a lso Pico’s city—­became ‘Re­nais­sance Florence’ only ­after the 1860s, before a crueler tourism enriched and ravaged it. The Duomo, Orsanmichele, the Palazzo Vecchio, and other sights could be seen as the world now sees them only a­ fter the city was redesigned in the late nineteenth c­ entury. Like other urban planners of the day, the architect Giuseppe Poggi loved a g rid of straight, wide streets—­impossible for the ­whole of Florence, which took centuries to acquire its broken geometry. Some t­ hings can be built in a day, however: it took just a few years to put up a hideous Arcone in a new Piazza della Reppublica—­a camposanto for café society in the early monarchy. A banner on the Arch dated 1895 boasts of scrubbing away the “filth of the ages”: demolishing the Mercato Vecchio and Cosimo I’s ghetto, in other words, and ejecting families. With the medieval clutter swept away, tourists could look from the Corso (the old Roman decuman) straight down Via Strozzi to the Palazzo that now h ­ ouses the National Institute for Re­nais­sance Studies: che bella vista! But they would have seen the Arcone too. By the time Mayor Pietro Torriggiani was ready for more cleansing in 1897, the city was tired of it. Halting the proj­ect was a Florentine decision, encouraged by En­glish meddling. A leader of the fight to keep Florence safe for Pater’s Re­nais­sance was Violet Paget, known as Vernon Lee when she brought out Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Re­nais­sance and its sequel, Re­nais­sance Fancies and Studies. ­After publishing Euphorion in 1895, she lived in Florence for forty more years, writing letters to the Times and pushing her urban vision with power­ful friends back home and abroad—­including Henry James. The Florence bequeathed by Paget and her friends to global tourism was not the up-­to-­date city planned for locals by Poggi and Torriggiani. Yet it

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was ­those Florentines, anxious to ‘remediate,’ who moved ­things along ­toward what now straddles the Arno—­some of it glorious, some of it cheap and tasteless. ­Either way, ­because Florence calls up so strong a s ense of place and so much visual joy, the period forever linked with the city—­the Renaissance—­must also be resplendent or try to be. The same goes for Re­nais­sance ­people, like Pico. His name and deeds have long been celebrated, and he inherited a p lace from George Eliot, who also had some personality to give. For a face, however, ­there was nothing much for Pico in Romola—­just some “long curls”—­and nothing at all in Browning’s Dramatic Lyr­ics. Pater said he looked like a Mercury or a Raphael. Beauty like that is generic—­nothing personal.39 As of 1900, according to a Murray’s Handbook of that year, ­there was nothing in Florence ­grand enough to compensate for Pico’s inconspicuous memorial in San Marco or off set the shame of Palgrave’s report. A ­ fter examining the Santissima Annunziata and a f ew lesser churches, this Handbook directed visitors to a building owned by Benedictine nuns, “the Church of S. Ambrogio . . . ​restored and . . . ​so dark that its pictures can hardly be seen. Left of the High Altar is a Chapel in memory of a miracle of a chalice being found to contain natu­ral blood. . . . ​The fresco by Cosimo Rosselli describes the miracle. It is a vigorous group, spoiled by impertinent details.” Impertinent details? Someone watches from a high w ­ idow at the rear of the painting (Figure  12). In the left foreground, three young men are prominent—­though not central. What are they talking about? Not the action on the church steps, evidently—­whatever it is. An old eucharistic miracle? Nuns transferring a r elic to their bishop for authentication? Maybe the bishop is giving it back. A pro­cession forms up—or disperses. Is the crowd celebrating the feast of the Lord’s Body? If so, the most vis­i­ble male laity would be officials of the Judges and Notaries Guild, patrons of the Corpus Domini cult at Sant’Ambrogio. The fresco shows the church in the late Quattrocento, so the portraits are of ­people from Pico’s time. Some portraits t­ here certainly are: at the far lower left, the man with the black hat—­Rosselli himself—­a lso looks us in the eye from his Sermon on t he Mount in the Sistine Chapel. But who e­ lse is the painter showing us in Sant’Ambrogio? Maybe the foregrounded triads of males are Guild members impor­tant enough to have their pictures painted.40 Why is the w ­ hole crowd or most of it not looking t­ oward the church? Is Rosselli cutting a slice of life as a pro­cession breaks up—­a Florentine street



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Figure 12.  Miracle of the Sacrament, Cosimo Rosselli, 1484–1486.

scene? Nuns inside the church might have ­imagined a v aguely reverent bello mondo outside. What is the inattentive crowd talking about: that many are called but few are chosen? If the triads of males are anonymous, not much turns on their inattentiveness. But visitors who check the internet before entering the church w ­ ill find celebrities named—­Ficino, Pico, and Poliziano (Figure 13)—­and the prince described as “dressed in green and with the typical cap copied for Paolo Giovio’s gallery of illustrious persons. His companions touch his hands, seeming to comfort him and give him strength: this prob­ably refers to a timely topic—­his philosophical ­theses presented in this period to the pope and causing a sensation, especially a thesis specifically on the topic of the eucharist that earned him excommunication and then, a ­little ­later, a brief arrest in 1488.” 41 In fact, the young man in green (in three-­quarter view) is hatless, though Giovio’s Pico (shown in profile, see Figure 15) wears a cap. And the fresco, finished on August 7, 1486, could not yet reflect trou­ble from Rome. Pico made his ­theses public six months ­later, and the pope took more time to act. At the moment of publication, the author was just twenty-­three—­ not yet famous or notorious. Rosselli had started work in the spring of

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Figure 13. ​Miracle of the Sacrament, Rosselli, detail.

1484, when the prince was twenty-­one and even less a celebrity. Why put this attractive young man—­not a Florentine—on display with this crowd in front of this church? If the boy / man in green is Pico in his very early twenties, how old are his two comforters? In 1486, when Rosselli finished the fresco, Ficino was fifty-­three—­thirty years older than Pico—­and Poliziano was thirty-­three. Ghirlandaio painted them both around the same time in Santa Maria Novella, having already shown Poliziano in Santa Trinità as no downy-­cheeked boy.42 The person to the green youth’s right is talking to him; if this ­were Poliziano, what would he be saying to distract his friend from the sacred sight on the church steps? A sinopia next to the fresco shows that no such questions s­ topped Rosselli from changing his mind as he worked: he moved a long-­haired lad (wearing a hat) from the left edge of the picture ­toward the ­middle. ­A fter the sinopia was sketched, but before Rosselli



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finished, had minds changed about Eucharistic miracles in Florence? When the pope spoke—­nine months ­after the fresco was complete—­three of Pico’s thirteen condemned t­ heses w ­ ere statements about the Lord’s body: one of them, turning on a te chnical point of metaphysics, asserts that “without transforming bread into the body of Christ . . . ​this can be done so that Christ’s body is on the altar in keeping with the real­ity of the sacrament.” 43 How would the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio, gathered on the steps of their church, react to this priggish provocation? Six of them, about half their community, have assembled out front. Unlike the distracted laity, talking in separate groups, the nuns surround the priest to gaze at the miraculous relic and pray. One may be the abbess, Maria Barbadori, who commissioned Mino da Fiesole in 1481 to make a marble tabernacle for the Miracle Chapel. Mino’s work, not Rosselli’s, is the chapel’s focus: it has been called “a visual diagram of transubstantiation.” Rosselli’s less hieratic fresco is on a side wall, to the left of ­t hose adoring the Body of God, not in their line of sight. The worshippers with the most at stake in the church—­ the nuns—­were cloistered: a sideways glance at life outside may have been a treat.44 By not spotting Pico inside the church, Murray’s 1900 Handbook echoed Burckhardt’s silence: he too had not found the prince in Sant’Ambrogio. His Cicerone—­a guide to Italian art that could be read in En­glish by 1873—­ just says that Rosselli’s “only existing fresco in Florence (1486) shows a pro­cession with a m iraculous chalice: fine lively heads, composition crowded and not very dignified (würdige).” But Vasari had claimed that the fresco shows Pico “so admirably from nature that he looks alive, not painted.” Where? Is Vasari’s candidate the green man or the tall blue man ­behind ‘Poliziano.’ (Vasari does not mention Poliziano or Ficino.) Burckhardt had mastered Vasari’s Lives, so his silence was no oversight—­least of all about Pico, whose dignity he would soon change forever. Although Rosselli specialists now say that attaching names to the fresco is “controversial and still far from settled,” the organizers of Pico’s quincentenary in 1994 ­were less cautious. They made the triad from Sant’Ambrogio their official banner—­a flag to fly on the website of Mirandola’s International Center for Culture, with the prince as eponym.45 As the twentieth ­century dawned, if you ­were a tourist in Florence relying on Murray’s Handbook and wanted to see what Pico looked like, ­there

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Figure 14. ​Medal picturing Pico, attributed to Niccolò Fiorentino, before 1490.

was apparently ­l ittle to look at except the angels and gods of Pater’s ecstasies. Botticelli and ­others painted ­those numinous beings to populate allegories and illustrate fables from the Apocrypha—­not to make portraits of Pico and his friends. The only lifetime image securely linked with the prince is the profile on the much-­analyzed medal attributed to Niccolò Fiorentino, made some years before 1490 (Figure 14). The face is beefy, the brow low, the eye puff y, and the nose beaky: good hair, but not much more. If the facts looked like this, even flattered in bronze, Gianfrancesco’s words about his u ­ ncle’s good looks sat poorly with real­ity, despite constant corroboration by witnesses who never saw Pico. The nephew’s aff ection left a topos for other biographers: “the nickname given him, the Phoenix, was rightly said b ­ ecause the gods above endowed him with all the very rarest gifts of body and mind, . . . ​ a handsome face, elegant manners and incomparable eloquence.” The words come from Giovio’s Pico Box. In print, his Pico is a P hoenix—­ despite the homely profile in the engraving that illustrates the Box.46 Giovio’s image is unprepossessing—to say it in the kindest way—­and matches a p ostmortem iconography (Figure  15). Strikingly unlike any



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other image of Pico, by contrast, is another picture with his name on it—­ now hung in Palazzo Strozzi above a filing cabinet and rarely seen elsewhere. Maybe the name was a ­mistake. Maybe the painting was pure (if morbid) fantasy, like the puzzling fabrication in a late sixteenth-­century engraving from a Library of Prints. If the name in the Palazzo Strozzi picture is correct, however, one way to explain the sharp nose, pinched features, and grim expression would be that Pico was ill (or fasting too much) and losing weight before he died.47 The unlovely Palazzo Strozzi picture, in any case, fits the circumstances better than the puzzling fresco in Sant’Ambrogio. Almost anything would be a better match than the picture painted by Paul Delaroche in 1842, a bizarre Childhood of Pico della Mirandola (Figure 16). Within a f ew years of finishing this painting, Delaroche became im­mensely fash­ion­able. He admired Raphael, painted other Re­nais­ sance scenes, and liked m ­ others with ­children. But why make Pico the baby Jesus and put his ­mother, Giulia Boiardo, in the Virgin’s place? Except as a pa rent of her child, Giulia sailed through history with a small wake. In Gianfrancesco’s Life, she acts only to give birth, turn her son over to tutors, and push him—­u nsuccessfully—­toward canon law and holy o ­ rders. The few words that transmit t­ hese facts precede and follow a de scription of the blazing omen—­a circle of fire—­seen at the prince’s birth. Pico entered the world in an aura of won­der and sanctity, if not divinity: to that extent, his nephew and first biographer confirmed what Delaroche would paint. What was on the paint­er’s mind? He shows a pa mpered child of the aristocracy as such an infant might have looked, with cushions and velvet, in a faraway place of someone’s dreams. Models for such a painting abounded in Christian art, including famous pictures like Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat in the Uffizi, whose Christ child is also rapt by a book. What­ever Delaroche was thinking, the result is surely the weirdest item in Pico’s mythical iconography, which has had ­little competition from anything real.48 But in this desert of evidence, even before modern viewers sighted Pico again in Sant’Ambrogio, his fame kept growing in the Re­nais­sance cherished by Savonarola Brown. Most of what the prince gained was by osmosis, from the personality of an era in its colorful locale, where even the extras starred in dramas written by Eliot and Browning, directed by Arnold and

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Figure 15. ​Three portraits of Pico.

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Figure 16. ​ἀ e Childhood of Pico della Mirandola, Paul Delaroche, 1842.

Carlyle, with costuming and set design by Pater, the PRB, and Murray’s guides—­waiting for Ruskin to pan them. One practiced spectator of British sensibilities was Pasquale Villari, an Italian who kept com­pany with the En­glish in Florence. This Neapolitan had studied with Francesco De Sanctis—­a Hegelian—in the heady months before 1848. In the aftermath he was arrested, moved to Florence and then Pisa, and returned to Florence in 1865. In 1863, two years a­ fter it appeared in Italian, his History of Girolamo Savonarola and His Times



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became a b est-­seller in ­England. The same applause greeted Niccolò Machiavelli and His Times, published in Italian between 1877 and 1882. The En­glish Machiavelli of 1892 opened with 230 pages to set the stage in the Renaissance—as potent a statement in its time as any by Burckhardt or Symonds. ­After his early days with De Sanctis and Hegel, Villari pledged allegiance to positivism in the most public way, in a s peech marking his appointment to a chair in Florence, which he held ­until 1913. His cultural authority was enormous—in history and philosophy but also in the arts and economics. Po­liti­cal ambition of the same scope brought him elected offices and ministerial appointments. In 1891 he was minister of education; in 1898 he became president of the Italian Historical Institute and a member of the Crusca, a prestigious acad­emy; and in 1902 he was named president of the Lincei. Ever since Mariana Starke supplemented her Italian Travels with A View of the Late Revolutions in ἀ at Country, ­there was sentiment in ­England to support Italy’s in­de­pen­dence and national unity. The revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini lived in London when he could not stay in Italy. En­glish friends—­one was Villari’s wife—­imagined him and Garibaldi in the Re­nais­sance style, thanks to Roscoe and his imitators. In this situation, since Villari had suff ered personally ­after 1848, his moral example reinforced sterling intellectual credentials. U ­ ntil ­after World War  I, no one could speak with greater authority to the En­glish about Italy’s past than this eminent public intellectual.49 In the ­earlier of two descriptions, Villari’s Pico is a duller flame circling the fiery Savonarola, the “prophet of the new civilization.” The prince also gets a long paragraph in a s ection on the Platonic Acad­emy in the ­later book, which restates what was said in the ­earlier work—­courteously but critically. ­After giving Pico credit, in the usual way, as ambitious, amiable, attractive, precocious, studious, and endowed with a stupendous memory, Villari evaluates “his ­great reputation,” ruling that “his acquirements, though extensive, w ­ ere superficial, his judgments dictated rather by enthusiasm than critical faculty. . . . ​Of the majority of the twenty-­two languages he was supposed to have studied, he knew l­ ittle more than the alphabet and the ele­ments of grammar. . . . ​[Although] he was . . . ​one of the first promoters of Oriental studies, as well as one of the best Greek and Latin scholars, . . . ​neither his Latin and Italian writings, much less his philosophy, show any marks of originality.”

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None of this claims more for Pico than Meiners or Buhle, and some of it corroborates Voltaire—­notably the remark about languages. In the Savonarola book, Villari had been even harsher: Posterity . . . ​has shown him l­ ittle indulgence, and his reputation has gradually died out. His vast erudition was on the w ­ hole very superficial; he was inferior to Poliziano in letters, to Ficino in philosophy. As to his vaunted knowledge of twenty-­t wo languages . . . ​, it was so slight that a Jew was able to palm upon him sixty manuscripts as books written by the command of Esdras, whereas in real­ity they w ­ ere only the well-­ known ‘Cabbala.’ And it is certain that his acquaintance with some of the twenty-­t wo tongues went ­little further than the alphabets. He wrote very inelegant Italian.

It never occurred to Villari, who wrote elegant Italian, that Pico’s Oration might compensate for other failings. The speech never comes up, and the ­theses introduced by it “­were but poor stuff in the main.” In the author’s native land—­and in ­England as well, where Villari’s readership was large—­ this was a common response to the prince and his Oration. An unsigned article in the eleventh edition of the Britannica (1910–1911) summed ­things up. When he was still in his late twenties, Pico was “a gay Italian nobleman; he was tall, handsome, fair-­complexioned, with keen grey eyes and yellow hair, and a g­ reat favourite with w ­ omen. But his trou­bles led him to more serious thoughts, and . . . ​[his] works cannot now be read with much interest, but the man himself is still in­ter­est­ing.” Part of Pico’s celebrity was notoriety, part was superficial and—­except according to Burckhardt, Symonds, and Pater—­none of it had much to do with dignity.50 Had Pippa passed Pico by?

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Pico across the Seas and Back The man himself is still in­ter­est­ing. —­a n o n.

1. ​Pico Our Paladin The pallid entry on Pico in the eleventh edition of the Britannica reflected his image in ­England before World War I, when even p ­ eople who knew the prince’s name wanted to know l­ ittle more. J. A. Symonds had praised him as a voice for liberty, relaying only part of Burckhardt’s mixed message, and Symonds’s public views ­were far from typical—­though not scandalous like his private opinions or Pater’s published statements. ­After the war, however, attitudes shifted, starting in Italy with Giovanni Gentile’s ana­ chronisms about modern dignity and premodern morals. Reviewing the “vast lit­er­a­ture” on the prince up to 1937, Eugenio Garin examined French and German as well as Italian writings, but nothing in En­glish. When he noted that some saw Pico as a “Paladin of f­ ree thought,” he had in mind patriotic passions fueled by the prince’s 1894 centennial in Mirandola.1 Changes of mind continued ­after World War II, when the action in En­glish moved across the Atlantic, as Paul Kristeller, his colleagues, and his students cleared, plowed, and planted the field of ‘Re­nais­sance Studies.’ Writing about Pico in 1964, Kristeller called attention to the “fame and fascination of his name.” By this time and outside of Italy, the prince’s most energetic promoter in the twentieth ­century had been Ernst Cassirer—­a more zealous Kantian than Kristeller with a large Anglophone readership. Cassirer started writing about the Re­nais­sance before 1906, when he published the first part of his Prob­lem of Knowledge in the Philosophy and 311

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Science of Modern Times. Almost forty years l­ater, he ended his c­ areer in North Amer­i­ca, where his influence in the arts and humanities continues, though not so much in philosophy: another phi­los­o­pher recently called him the “last phi­los­o­pher of culture.” His topic in Das Erkenntnisproblem, however, was not culture but cognition—­the core of Kantian thought. Tracing the prob­lem to Nicholas of Cusa’s speculations on arithmetic, to Platonists battling Peripatetics (from Ficino to Jacopo Zabarella), and humanists fighting scholastics (Valla to Mario Nizolio), then through the nature-­philosophers (Paracelsus to Bruno) ­toward creators of a new science (Leonardo to Galileo), he fi­nally tracked down the epistemic insights (Descartes to Bayle) required for Kant’s theory of knowledge.2 By clarifying both the moral law and laws of nature, Pico helped Kepler and foreshadowed Kant, according to Cassirer, who did not make the prince explic­itly Kantian in this early work—­where the critical philosophy motivates ­every page, nonetheless. In Pico’s era, “renewed ideas about nature and history” sharpened awareness of a world of objects cognized by subjects. Subject / object consciousness emerged from fresh spiritual energies no longer stifled by medieval disregard for nature. Even in a New Age, according to Cassirer, astrology aggravated the burden of the past by treating the stars as fixed ­causes that confined the spirit and suff ocated religion. Yet fatalism could not suppress all subjectivity in an organic cosmos where e­ very part contained the w ­ hole, ­every event was a sign and e­ very subject sensed ­every object through symbols, words, and numbers transmitting power throughout a h armonic totality. Forces merged in this magical universe, blurring subject / object relations and forcing Pico to bring them into focus. The daring prince claimed that when natu­ral signs in the heavens had real eff ects on earth, the causality was strictly physical: no ‘influences,’ just heat and light. ­People searching for their destinies should look within themselves, Pico insisted, not at the skies. Psychological and other forces limit ­human action, but ­people who gauge their eff ects correctly can exercise the freedom that treats such constraints rationally: we are the subjects who know how objects limit us. By Cassirer’s Kantian reckoning, “a stronger conception of natu­ral causality was joined with awareness of the special value of the moral personality . . . ​when deeper inquiry into objective nature led man back to insight into the true nature of the ego, while . . . ​deeper cognition of the ego opened up new regions of objective real­ity for him.” Although Cassirer imputed foresight about this dialectic to Pico, the



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prince’s prescience puzzled him when the vehicles for traffic between subjects and objects ­were symbols of Kabbalah, not scientific formulas. And yet the Oration seemed to speak boldly about nature and freedom. To analyze Pico’s other works, Cassirer loaded meaning on a few pieces of this ­little speech. The author’s biography did not interest him.3 In 1927 he dedicated his Individual and Cosmos to Aby Warburg, who published it in the Studies of the Warburg Library. The new book hailed Nicholas of Cusa, already featured in the Erkenntnisproblem, as the “first modern thinker” and claimed that he influenced the Oration. Although Cassirer criticized Pico for yielding ground won by Cusanus, he also found much to praise him for, some of it repeated from the ­earlier book—­the stress on causality and symbolism, for example, and the puzzle of accepting magic and Kabbalah while rejecting astrology. The treatment of magic in the new study was serious and sympathetic, though Pico’s ties to the Florentine Acad­emy drew criticism, like his final slide ­toward Savonarola and asceticism. Pico’s anti-­astrological crusade prefigured the scientific revolution, according to Cassirer, but ethics was the motive. Astrology, turning values upside down and letting ­matter rule the mind, stirred up an “ethical pathos” when the stars trapped p ­ eople in a material universe. The Oration broke ­free, however, by resolving the pathos in a de claration of h ­ uman in­de­pen­dence. Breakthroughs enlarged by Pico had started with Cusanus, who led him ­toward an original morality and metaphysics: “Man’s dignity cannot be grounded in his being, . . . ​which results from his ­doing; and this ­doing . . . ​includes the totality of his powers to form ­things. All forming that is genuinely creative involves more than just acting on the world. It assumes that the agent is distinguished from the acted-­upon, that the subject of acting makes itself distinct from its object and stands consciously opposed to it.” Citing the part of the Oration highlighted by Burckhardt, Cassirer used more of it and found a “polarity specific to the spirit of the Re­nais­sance. ­Human willing and h ­ uman knowing are required to turn totally t­ oward the world and yet totally diff erentiate ­humans from it. . . . ​ Turning ­toward the cosmos as a w ­ hole always produces the ability not to be bound to any of its parts.” Only the final phrase does as much justice to Pico as to Kant. The “turning-­toward,” the simultaneous apartness, purely rational subjects distanced from objects, agents distinct from what they act upon: ­these points resonate with the critical philosophy, not Pico’s rhetorical mythmaking. L ­ ater, Cassirer’s rhe­toric inspired a reading of Pico by

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Frances Yates that drifted even farther from the prince’s intentions and resources.4 In Pico’s works Cassirer saw a s ingle princi­ple “deeply concealed”—­ covered up like the “hidden linkage” that the prince himself ascribed to his Conclusions. This secret is a motif in an En­glish essay on Pico and “Re­nais­ sance ideas” that Cassirer finished (but did not yet publish) in 1938. Pico’s silences—­omissions about sin and guilt, for example—­revealed more to him than the prince’s statements. A muted heresy, rejecting Averroist naturalism while appropriating its case for h ­ uman autonomy, was still a tacit challenge to dogma. When Pico analyzed causality by distinguishing symbols from what they symbolize, the stress on symbolizing was anti-­ dogmatic in itself, according to Cassirer: finding signs of the One in transient particulars made a rigid theology impossible. As long as doctrine was fluid, h ­ umans ­were mobile in moral space and also in time. Cassirer, a virtuoso of Kantian hermeneutics, extracted a metaphysics of time from the Oration. The imagery that opens Pico’s speech is actually more spatial and cosmological than temporal, but this is how Cassirer read it: “The fact that man . . . ​is temporally conditioned and temporally mutable is the basis of his . . . ​distinctive power. . . . ​­Human freedom can be verified only in man’s moulding his own life. . . . ​The thinking subject must be raised above time . . . ​in its fundamental ‘transcendental’ character as the condition for all temporality. Pico comes close to this conception . . . ​ which is, in a sense, at the basis of his entire criticism of astrology.” The ­f ree subject vanquishes time. The ­human chameleon gets moral freedom not as God’s gift but by personal exploits: ­these are victories over time and necessity and they tie the Oration to the Disputations against astrology. Man’s versatile character, said Cassirer, “is founded frankly upon that distinction on which rests the entire structure of Pico’s thought: on the distinction between ‘Nature’ and ‘Freedom.’ . . . ​Every­thing physical is subject to strict necessity; every­thing spiritual rests on freedom. . . . ​The conclusive objection that Pico raises against astrology is that it fails to see this distinction.”5 But the prince’s magical thinking undermined this objection, even though the main message of the Disputations was ethical rather than scientific. Technical failings could not weaken a moral case against astrology, and yet numerology was not mathe­matics, and natu­ral philosophy—­with natu­ral magic as one of its parts—­was not an exact science. Although Cassirer was more thoughtful about magic than any of his peers except



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Warburg, he implied that Pico’s magia stayed “completely within nature,” despite its reliance on a super­natural Kabbalah. Moreover, even if the only legitimate magic had been natu­ral, lawless demons still roamed Pico’s world, where he was not—as Cassirer described him—­“the only man of his age completely f­ ree from fear of demons.” On the contrary: one of his ­theses warns a clumsy Kabbalist against being “devoured by Azazel,” and the Oration denounces “rites of evil demons” without denying their efficacy. In Cassirer’s eyes, nonetheless, the prince was semi-­emancipated and— in this Kantian’s l­ater writings—­a proto-­Kant. He assumed that De hominis dignitate was the orator’s title for the Oration and that it captured the essence of his thought. Yet he also saw its deepest meaning as hidden even from Pico, who let o ­ thers bring his ideas to full development: “the g­ reat theme announced in his Oration . . . ​resounded . . . ​in the religious conflicts of . . . ​the Reformation, . . . ​the new philosophy of nature, and . . . ​in the modern rebirth of philosophical idealism.” As history kept grinding on t­ oward Kant’s philosophy, Cassirer’s Pico was a paladin for the critical system.6 And as the world slid t­ oward war again, Cassirer was Kant’s champion in Eu­rope: he produced an edition of the master’s works in 1912 and a new biography in 1914. But ­after 1918 and the end of the war, he changed directions. He made his own system—­the philosophy of symbolic forms—­into more than a ‘fourth critique,’ not just an extension of Kant’s work beyond metaphysics, morality, and judgment to culture itself. ­Because Hegel had more to say than Kant about cultural development, Cassirer broadened his Kantian heritage with insights from Hegel, and his progressive rationalism sometimes turned abstract and dogmatic. In 1942, when he fi­nally published his En­glish essay on Pico, he mentioned that he had not been following the lit­er­a­ture. But he called attention to “the impor­tant work of Avery Dulles, . . . ​[who] by emphasizing the traditional features in Pico’s work and rather one-­sidedly placing them in the foreground . . . ​is willing to recognize only a ‘medieval realist.’ . . . ​He is unable to develop this position consistently. . . . ​I do not at all deny the close connection between Pico’s thought and scholasticism, . . . ​but the center . . . ​lies elsewhere . . . ; we must look for it in t­ hose strains that point not to the past but to the f­ uture.” This late work by Cassirer (he died in 1945) is so decoupled from history that when Dulles tied Pico to the scholastic ­Middle Ages—­a past even more remote than the Renaissance—­his

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l­ ittle book made a striking counterpoint, or counterblast, to Cassirer’s progressive ideology. Princeps Concordiae, a p rize-­winning essay by a H arvard undergraduate, identified the prince as one of the e­ nemy—an “idealist” who had to be refuted by presenting him (so Cassirer complained) as a “medieval realist.”7 Dulles—­later a Jesuit cardinal—­wrote his essay while moving t­ oward Catholicism. His relatives stayed Presbyterian and thrived on the Cold War: his ­father, John Foster Dulles, became secretary of state and denounced the Soviet Union for “despotism and godless terrorism”; John’s ­brother Allen was the first CIA director. The cardinal-­to-be wanted to disinfect philosophy b ­ ecause it was diseased by “germs of Hegelianism.” Helped by Kristeller, who had come to Columbia in 1939, Dulles read the new Italian studies of Pico by Anagnine and Garin. He also knew that ­earlier Italian Hegelians—­Spaventa and De Sanctis—­had influenced Gentile and that Gentile taught Giuseppe Saitta, whose hostility to the scholastics off ended him. Even Garin and Anagnine, whom he judged to be sound and original, did not meet his standards when medieval dogma was on the ­table. Kristeller earned praise for acknowledging what humanists owed to scholasticism.8 Dulles looked for a “ unified doctrinal account of Pico’s system” and found it in medieval theologians. Accepting humanism as only part of the prince’s story, he rejected Anagnine’s view that he was a syncretist and had even less patience for the “idealist” claim that his thinking—­like Hegel’s Spirit—­evolved through vari­ous stages. In so short a p ublic life, Dulles reckoned, t­ here was ­little time for Hegelian Overcoming (Aufhebung). Was it pos­si­ble, he asked, “that Pico was a scholastic only in the first years of his life, when the De ente et uno, written but two years before his death, is almost purely scholastic?” His sharp sentences slice through implausible abstractions. Dulles presented Pico’s thought as homogeneous, even though he wavered on magic, astrology, and Kabbalah. Conceding that the young prince was tempted by “planet-­worship,” he saw the Disputations as a more mature work whose “views on astrology seem to have under­gone some evolution.” He also discovered “some ground for supposing that Pico came subsequently to abandon his belief in natu­ral magic.” ­These qualifications clutter a case that would have been even more doctrinaire without them: Pico’s unitary system, if the philosophy unifying it was Catholic, could have left no room for astrology and magic. Nor could



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Kabbalah have aff ected the “substantial character of his philosophy.” What competent philosopher—or good Christian—­would tolerate this madness? Dogmatic reflexes kept Dulles from taking Kabbalah or magic seriously.9 On morality and moral theology, however, he was careful and insightful. Noting that h ­ uman choice takes up l­ ittle of Pico’s published output—­ just a few pages in the Oration and fewer in the Heptaplus—he downgraded the speech along with idealist readings of it. It was the least of Pico’s works, he concluded, more rhe­toric than philosophy. Besides, Christians had discussed dignity long before Pico. Idealists exaggerated his originality and mistook a medieval doctrine of grace and works for modern assertions of ­human autonomy. Pico did not want to emancipate anyone, Dulles declared, only to raise humanity to angelic heights. His philosophy was a prelude to ascent—­but just a prelude, ­because philosophy cannot rise as high as love. He cited the closing of De ente et uno: “Let us then flee from the world which ‘lieth in wickedness’; let us depart to the F ­ ather Who is the peace which unifies, Truth itself, the Good itself. But what ­will give us wings to fly t­ here? The love of ­things which are on high! What ­will take them from us? The perverse love of ­things on earth!” Dulles linked this passage (where the “Good itself” unbowdlerized is voluptas optima, the “best plea­sure”) to a part of the Oration that subordinates philosophy to theology, the true path to peace that “angels descending to earth have announced to men of good w ­ ill so that through this peace ­these same men, ascending to heaven, might be made into angels.” Where Pico wants to escape the world and fly to a higher peace, Dulles s­ topped quoting, before the speech announces that the soul “­will wish to die in herself that she might live in her spouse, in whose sight the death of his saints is truly precious—­the death, I m ean (if one should use the word death for life in its fullness) that sages have said one practices when d ­ oing philosophy.” What the Psalmist said about “the death of his saints” was a Kabbalist motif, cited by Pico in a thesis on the “death of the kiss.” Since Dulles thought Kabbalah unimportant, he was unlikely to notice. But he respected the rigor of Pico’s asceticism and knew how alien it was to modern morality: “Not even in his exaltation of peace does the Prince of Concord speak with the voice of a l­ater age.” This is the final sentence of a book that—­despite its brevity and bias—­has come closer than any other work in En­glish to capturing the prince’s character: he was not the forward-­looking prodigy still seen in the Pico Boxes.10

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Dulles was ferociously hostile to idealism, trying also to show that “individualist, anthropocentric and immanentist” humanism was not the message even of a single speech by Pico, much less the sum of his ideas. He built a large case from small points. Against Cassirer, he maintained that Nicholas of Cusa’s prob­lem about cognition—­t he ‘subject / object’ prob­lem—­was no worry at all for Pico. Cassirer was a prime target for Dulles: he correctly classified him as neo-­Kantian, and by distinguishing Cassirer’s kind of idealism from other kinds, he correctly diagnosed the phi­los­o­ pher’s movement t­ oward Hegel. Lumping him with the obtuse Saitta was less judicious. Ele­ments of Kant’s moral philosophy are modern m ­ ental furniture, so common that even Dulles—­a fierce vindicator of scholasticism—­used ­these words to exculpate Pico of idealist humanism: “He regarded liberty as the privilege to do right without external compulsion, . . . ​not sheer indeterminacy but the capacity to obey reason.” Subtract the smug “privilege,” and Kant could have said it. Compare what he did say: The absolutely good ­w ill, whose princi­ple must be a categorical imperative, is indeterminate in regard to all objects. Freedom can never be located in the rational subject’s ability to make a choice in conflict with his lawgiving reason, even if experience shows often enough that this happens. Freedom alone, in relation to reason’s inner lawgiving, is actually an ability; the possibility of deviating from it is a disability.

Like Kant’s w ­ hole system, this interplay of freedom, nature, and reason is intricate; broadly speaking, freedom is the agent’s inner power to act morally in accordance with laws of reason and without compulsion from laws of nature. For a moralist like Dulles, an aspiring Jesuit, such formulations ­were potent.11

2. ​A Textbook Case In 1948 Pico’s thought encountered Kant’s philosophy again in ἀe Re­nais­ sance Philosophy of Man. The title page displayed Cassirer’s and Kristeller’s names alongside John Herman Randall’s: like Kristeller, Randall was a phi­ los­o­pher teaching at Columbia. Cassirer had died in 1945, however, and his colleagues regretted losing the introduction that he had planned to



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contribute. Seventy years l­ater, nonetheless, this durable l­ ittle book still advertises Cassirer’s ideal of philosophical pro­gress—­a pageant that pleased postwar Americans. To lead a parade of Re­nais­sance liberators, the Pico idolized by Cassirer and Burckhardt and Symonds was the ideal drum major. The Re­nais­sance described by Kristeller and Randall in their introduction to the book was more sedate, however, not to say h ­ umble. Its philosophy was second-­class, more a curriculum than a philosophy: “No phi­los­o­ pher of the very first importance” worked in the Re­nais­sance, when “interest in philosophy was but secondary” for humanists. What ­little philosophy t­ here was in Pico’s time focused on ethics. And if magic was impor­tant to the prince and his contemporaries, it was now unseemly for respectable professors. Pico’s mastery of Christian scholasticism was exceptional, yet themes of the Oration—­“the dignity of man founded on man’s freedom” and the “glorification of man”—­were slogans of secular humanism. This progressive thinker had put his mark on the Re­nais­sance by advancing the cause of liberty. In North Amer­i­ca—­not long ­after World War II—­this was how eminent academics presented Pico and his Italy to their students.12 In separate remarks on the Oration, apart from the general introduction, Kristeller described the prince’s appeal to the “popu­lar imagination,” his failure to produce a “mature system,” and the medley of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic sources that ­others found bizarre and contradictory. Not even Kabbalah was too much for Pico, nor was astrology. Kristeller followed Cassirer by connecting the Disputations with morality rather than science while still giving Pico the benefit of Kepler’s recognition. But the Oration was Pico’s masterpiece: its topics ­were ­human dignity and philosophical concord. In the usual way, Kristeller reviewed the speech’s setting in Pico’s ­career and his absurd plan to dispute in Rome. But he also put the Oration in a genre—­the academic inaugural address or prolusione—­and divided it into two parts: the first praises man’s freedom and unbounded potential; the second outlines the old and new wisdom contained in the 900 ­theses and proclaims the unity of truth. Although the topic of ­human dignity was traditional, according to Kristeller, Pico’s conception of liberty was original. Disagreeing with Dulles, he saw more in the speech than rhe­toric. His introduction—­informative, methodical, and straightforward—­ never confronted the magic in the Oration: Kristeller said less about it than Dulles. Thousands of teachers used his l­ ittle book to teach many more

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students, year a­ fter year, who ­were never told why Pico made so much of magic in a work read as a declaration of liberal values. The book tempered Cassirer’s Kantian bluster without silencing it, and the result was not much dif­fer­ent: Pico was not the saintly genius of Gianfrancesco’s Vita or the meaner ascetic of More’s Lyfe, nor the superstitious syncretist condemned by Brucker or the sans-­culottes emancipator lauded by Ricardo Bartoli and Symonds, and certainly not the docile scholastic summoned up by Dulles to confute Cassirer. He was more like the phi­los­o­pher of ­human dignity discovered by Wilhelm Tennemann: his “theory of the dignity of man” reinforced “perhaps the only philosophical idea . . . ​of the early Humanists.” But this shallow Pico was a false front in ἀ e Re­nais­sance Philosophy of Man, where the prob­lem of magic, which vexed Cassirer, Warburg, and Tennemann, was no prob­lem at all.13 Preparations for celebrating Pico’s birth in 1963 caused Kristeller to take another look at him: what he produced was on the scale of a small book—­a detailed study of primary sources and secondary lit­er­a­ture that appeared in 1965. A more accessible chapter in his Eight Phi­los­o­phers of the Italian Re­nais­sance had come out a year ­earlier, and no serious account of the prince’s thought has reached more readers of En­glish. Eight Phi­los­o­ phers provides more biography and says more about Kabbalah than ἀ e Re­nais­sance Philosophy of Man, while also evaluating Pico’s Platonism and summarizing other works besides the Oration. Kristeller called the speech “perhaps the most widely known document of early Re­nais­sance thought,” and he made it the focus of his chapter. Citing the part of the Oration made familiar by Burckhardt, Cassirer, and Symonds, he traced its genealogy and compared the author’s views to Ficino’s. Echoing Cassirer, he mentioned Kepler and claimed that religion rather than science turned Pico against astrology. But t­ here is no transcendental or existentialist critique of time, no subject / object distinction, no liberating ­battle against nature. Pico’s eff usive words fall sweetly on modern ears, Kristeller warned, but his ideas w ­ ere not modern: they emerged from an older Christian piety. Nonetheless, the “eloquent praise of ­human excellence and man’s potentialities” was no “mere piece of oratory.” Pico also defended “man’s dignity and liberty” in the “attack on astrology”: once again, Tennemann’s conclusions without Cassirer’s bombast but also without an assessment of the magic prob­lem, which Kristeller awkwardly declined to address. “We must face the fact that [Pico] . . . ​accepted natu­ral magic,” he regretted. Having uttered the word ‘magic,’ he went on to show the prince mixing Christian



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Kabbalah with the ancient theology in “perhaps the strangest part of the complex heritage that Florentine Platonism . . . ​left to . . . ​our own time. Part of this heritage is distasteful to some,” he confessed, “including myself. . . . ​We must resign ourselves to the fact that in the thought of the past . . . ​truth and error, sense and nonsense, are combined.”14 Shortly ­after Eight Phi­los­o­phers appeared, the American textbook market promoted Pico again in an inexpensive En­glish version of the Oration, Heptaplus, and De ente et uno, published in a widely read series, the Library of Liberal Arts. Paul Miller, the editor, was a phi­los­o­pher and a Thomist: he introduced Pico as exceptional in summing up the “spirit of the Italian Re­nais­sance.” Tolerance, curiosity, mastery of so many schools—­a ll t­ hese ­were remarkable. Despite his exotic learning, however, even Greek texts—­ let alone Hebrew—­were “peripheral” for him, compared to Christian writings in Latin. Kabbalah had no real value—­just more “puerile and aff ected” occultism. Christian erudition—­shored up by alien wisdom, not undermined—­led to “a single pious philosophy,” building on secrets passed down from Hermes Trismegistus to Plato. None of this was humanism, according to Miller, which was “not a philosophy at all.” And yet Pico’s approach was “humanistic on a philosophical level,” proclaimed in a speech about choice and freedom—­though not “absolute freedom.” Miller, like Dulles, understood the Oration as putting ­humans in a “definite place” in the metaphysical order while leaving moral choice unrestricted. Other­wise, his devout attenuation of the Kantian Pico is too brief to bear analy­sis. Still more cautious was his reaction to the magic in the Oration—if silence was caution.15 The most eccentric of the cheap introductions to Pico for college students was published for Russell Kirk in 1956 by Regnery Gateway, still the “leader in conservative books” ­today, according to its website. Kirk—­a pundit and admirer of Edmund Burke—­was writing about ethics and politics in the early 1950s, while Leo Strauss was lecturing on Burke. Like Giannozzo Manetti, Strauss thought of h ­ uman dignity as a kind of excellence: some ­people have a “ superior” dignity that is and ­ought to be “authoritative.” Unlike Manetti’s elitism, however, Strauss’s was not tied to Christian revelation—as was Kirk’s reverent but more demotic dignity. ­Humans have it, he explained, “­because they are made in the image of God and are b ­ rothers in Christ.” He also published the essay from the Regnery book as “Pico della Mirandola and H ­ uman Dignity” in ἀ e Month, a Jesuit periodical. ­Later he converted to Catholicism.16

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He approached Pico obliquely (in the Straussian way), wounding the messenger to send a message. He started by quoting Symonds, in prose as lively—if not as lucid—as the language used by Symonds in a d if­fer­ent po­liti­cal register. Alert to Pico’s magic and not timid, Kirk called him a “mystic, magician and g­ rand scholar,” seeing in him “Gothic complexity” mixed with the “egoism and enlightenment of the Re­nais­sance.” His audacious use of Kabbalah to prove Christ’s divinity brought him to the “brink of heresy.” This Romantic Pico was sinfully arrogant ­because he put ­humans too close to angels: “The very Cherubim and Seraphim must endure the equality of man,” who can be saved only by acknowledging that his glory is in God’s image and all his power in God’s gift. This is the real “essence of humanism,” according to Kirk, expressed better by Erasmus and Thomas More than by Pico. The prince got it right only by allowing that ­human ­will needs discipline and h ­ uman nature needs redemption. Even so, his manifesto planted seeds of moral ruin, sowing whirlwinds of communism, pornography, and the bomb for the modern world to reap. In the wake of the speech, “the oratorical aspirations of the humanists ­were transformed into the technological aspirations of the modern sensual man,” and “­human dignity is at its lowest ebb, now, when Man’s power over nature is at its summit.” This ultramontane rant reversed the polarity of nature and freedom as Kant saw it. Having overcome nature, having won the prizes of pro­gress, man has dehumanized himself, and Pico’s ­mistakes ­were roots of a moral catastrophe. Thinking of Thomas More and what might be sal­vaged from the prince’s humanism, Kirk wrote warmly about discipline, humility, martyrdom, orthodoxy, submission to God as Master, and “the overlordship of One greater than Man,” corrupted by a “fallen and sinful nature, . . . ​ a miserable foul creature watched by an angry God.” Humanity’s crooked timber deserved to burn in hell, according to Kirk. What­ever its virtues, the less-­agitated Kantian narrative that passed from Tennemann through Cassirer to Kristeller had skipped some of Pico’s story while adding praises of dignity that never occurred to him. Writing, rewriting, compressing, and second-­guessing had leached the stains of magic and Kabbalah from the portrait seen by American college students ­after midcentury. Despite its vices, Kirk’s nasty parody was truer to the facts in at least one way: he recognized that the Oration preaches magic, and he saw this sin of the “sorcerer and rhetorician and mystic” as an off ense against religion, not a blot on freedom.17



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Kirk’s book—­just a pamphlet, ­really—­foreshadowed the Oration published in 1994 by Silvio Berlusconi in an up-­market series, a L ibrary of Utopia, along with other classics in translation by Erasmus, Machiavelli, and Thomas More. When Berlusconi’s TV station, Canale V, interviewed him about this proj­ect in the mid-1980s, Luigi Firpo happened to tune in: Firpo was a distinguished historian, politician, and public intellectual who died in 1989. In 2006 his wife told a reporter about her husband’s reaction “when he saw on TV that Berlusconi had copied his translation” of More’s Utopia. “To get that book, he grabbed the telephone. They told him it was a ‘private edition.’ . . . ​But he managed . . . ​to get a copy, and as he leafed through it he sputtered ‘it’s not plagiarism, it’s worse. This person has copied w ­ hole passages of my preface and my translation of the Latin, . . . ​putting his signature on it without changing a comma!’ ” In 2017 a bookseller still advertised a Utopia with Berlusconi’s preface and a “ translation by Domenico Magnino.” Writing in 1991, Berlusconi claimed that in 1978 he had been “the first in Italy to bring out the original text . . . ​in the critical edition by Yale, and to write the preface as well. The firm of Neri Pozza published it in Luigi Firpo’s translation. ­Today, in presenting this ‘classic for the soul’ again in a new version,” he protested, “I believe I need to change nothing that I w rote then, when communism’s ­grand utopia had not yet fallen.” This was also the pedigree of Berlusconi’s 1994 Oration, published for Pico’s centennial, followed by a 1995 edition that the prime minister or his flack introduced: “It is a manifesto setting out coordinates for man himself. In ­these times of ours we habitually see man as an ensemble of needs. Pico does not deny this thesis but reminds us that man’s true essence lies in what values he has, in the spiritual luggage that God trusts him to carry. Values, needs and dignity make the ­human—­with kind permission from the materialists of Pico’s time and ­today.” When God was not using him as his beast of burden, Pico could run errands for Forza Italia: Berlusconi spoke bluntly if not clearly, putting the prince in embarrassing com­pany.18

3. ​A Hermetic Pico In 1958, two years a­ fter Kirk’s bizarre remarks, Lynn Thorndike finished the last installment of his History of Magic and Experimental Science. D. P. Walker brought out his Spiritual and Demonic Magic in the same year. In this period, with Walker and Frances Yates in their prime at the Warburg

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Institute, Pico gained new fame as an icon of cultural history—­a lthough in a dif­fer­ent context, the history of science, he had been scarred by Thorndike’s attacks. Thorndike started his enormous proj­ect in 1902, even before the first installment of Cassirer’s Erkenntnisproblem. In 1923 he introduced the first of eight volumes with a line from Hegel, taking it second­ hand from J. G. Frazer and coming as close to modern philosophy as he could stand. This industrious scholar had the weaknesses of his strengths, which ­were empiricist through and through. A curator of facts with ­little regard for theory, he set up a ­simple framework and filled it out with six de­cades of research: planning a history of magic, he soon saw that natu­ral objects ­were involved physically in practices of magic and conceptually in its princi­ples, a f eature that magic shares with science; experiment—­ manipulating such objects in order to understand them—is a procedure shared by magic and science: pro­gress happens as the latter gradually overcomes the former a­ fter learning from it, in Thorndike’s formulation.19 Pico picked the wrong side, he de­cided; he mentioned the Oration only in passing and denied the Disputations any insight into ­free ­will. He acknowledged Pico’s assault on the astrologers but dismissed it as unfinished. The prince got credit for points scored, but his shaky case against astrology was more invective than investigation. His “leanings ­were ­toward magic and the Cabala, . . . ​and his attack on astrology was in a s ense an attack on science, . . . ​more . . . ​a religious retreat than a scientific advance.” Thorndike disliked Pico as an emblem of a period that he despised—­the Re­nais­sance or “classical reaction”—­writing the prince off as amateurish, confused, contentious, gullible, and overrated. In eff ect, he reverted to Brucker’s position—­and cited him.20 Thorndike knew that anthropologists thought of magic as primitive, a concept that meant ­little to him. Always the empiricist but not a s ocial scientist, he could never find “any one under­lying princi­ple, such as sympathy, symbolism [or] imitation” in all the archives that he searched for data on magic. The same experience—­aggravated by horror of the primitive and guided by a lifelong compulsion to understand its submission to civilization—­drove Aby Warburg to write elegant essays and collect the remarkable library that eventually found its way to London and the Institute named for him.21 Warburg said ­little about Pico except that his fight against astrology was courageous. But he added depth to the prince’s celebrity by showing how



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magic—­which he deplored—­could entice someone so learned. As a prominent citizen of Hamburg, he was close to its university and eventually to Cassirer, who moved ­there in 1919 and became rector in 1929, the year of Warburg’s death. Cassirer’s eff ort to solve the magic prob­lem profited from Warburg’s books and his example. “Warburg has shown from astrology’s history,” he wrote, “that it has a split personality. In theory it seeks to pre­sent . . . ​ the universe to us along plain and clear lines, while in practice the fear of demons is its sign.” What Warburg called the “de-­demonizing process”—­ Entdämonisierung, like Max Weber’s Entzauberung—­was a bold step taken by Re­nais­sance thinkers ­toward modernity and disenchantment.22 Warburg studied art and culture from the perspective of the psy­chol­ ogy, anthropology, and evolutionary biology taught in the nineteenth ­century. He hoped to produce a g­ rand theory of social memory that would show how images made by Eu­ro­pe­ans changed as they persisted ­after antiquity. He respected Burckhardt but despised his vulgarizers, who beatified the individual and gave the impression that escaping the primitive was easy. Warburg saw this task as always unfinished. The civilizing pro­ cess keeps oscillating between magic and logic. He thought that primitive p ­ eople sublimate their terrors by making concrete images of them—­surrogates to manipulate and replicas to master in ritual. The menace of Eu­rope’s old gods haunts his prose: By way of reliable words and images, astral deities passed from Arabia, Spain and Italy to Germany, where ­after 1470 ­t hese wanderers . . . ​still lived as time-­gods, . . . ​demonic beings whose twin powers conflicted in an eerie way: as star-­signs, as signposts for souls flying through the cosmos, they made space expand; but as constellations they ­were also idols, and poor creatures might hope for mystical u ­ nion with them. . . . ​ Astrologers calculated just this antithesis—­a nexus of pious ritual versus abstract mathe­matics—as turning points for the state of the soul. . . . ​ Logic, with its conceptually isolated terms, creates a space for thinking between ­humans and objects, the very ­mental space that magic destroys by linking objects with h ­ umans and drawing them together—­ theoretically or practically—in superstition.

Ideal ­humans would march straight from reflex to reason. But real ­people and real cultures always move back and forth between magic and logic, rising from embodiment to detachment and sinking back again from mathe­matics into religion.23

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The role of images is mediating and bivalent; they are channels of energy, but the energy can illuminate or obscure; images externalize and suppress fear in artistic conventions or concentrate it in ­human persons. The images to which Warburg returned again and again ­were of pagan gods—­deformed and degraded in late antiquity ­after losing their noble Hellenic forms and reverting to clumsy fetishes. Then the ancient gods ­were liberated in the Re­nais­sance, waking from the nightmare of medieval astrology and rising again to Olympian serenity. But astrology was a shifting weight on the scales of culture: even horoscopic figuring and fanciful celestial geometry required rational calculations that might ­free the mind from star demons—or not. Hence, “in astrology two totally opposed ­mental powers, which logically must exclude one another, have merged into a single ‘method’: mathe­matics, the finest tool for abstract thinking, joined with the fear of demons, the most primitive form of religious causation.” Insofar as Warburg’s methods w ­ ere psychological rather than philosophical, his cultural history could not be Kantian like Cassirer’s. But the two Hamburg scholars supported one another. The nature / freedom polarity that ­shaped Cassirer’s thinking was like Warburg’s magic / logic antithesis. By deciphering magical images, he tried to explain the “tragic history of f­ ree thinking in modern Eu­rope.” His abhorrence of magic as primitive and of astrology as fatalist supported Kant’s proj­ect of rescuing ­human agency from nature. And his focus on the subject / object distinction reflected the pervasive influence of Kant’s system on German intellectuals before and ­after World War I.24 Frances Yates, who did her best work on Shakespeare, was even less philosophical than Warburg, though her ­later books show traces of Kant, by way of Cassirer. Near the end of her study of Giordano Bruno, she claimed that modern science emerged ­after the Re­nais­sance from a “new direction of the w ­ ill ­towards the world” and that one of the forces ­behind it was “Pico’s momentous association of Hermetism with Cabalism.” In broader terms, the “real function of the Re­nais­sance Magus in relation to the modern period . . . ​is that he changed the ­will. It was now dignified and impor­tant for man to operate . . . ​and not contrary to the w ­ ill of God that man, the ­great miracle, should exert his powers.” The world-­engaging ­will prevailed in “that momentous hour” which led “unerringly onwards to that mastery over nature in modern science which has been the astonishing achievement of modern Eu­ro­pean man.”25



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Although “mastery over nature in modern science” was indispensable for Warburg, he never thought of the path to civilization as straight: pro­ gress has always wavered between disciplined w ­ ill and emotional panic. Yates continued his proj­ect of understanding classicism as a tradition, but her most influential book—­containing her major statement on Pico—­ disregarded Warburg’s tragic sense of history: her magical melodrama ended in the dawn of science, when Man the Magus conjured up the modern world without awareness of Warburg’s dread of magic. In her Bruno book, a­ fter noting the importance of Warburg’s “unique library” in the preface, she did not develop his ideas about magic.26 Pico, she claimed, reinforced Ficino’s Neoplatonic and Hermetic magic with Jewish wisdom to create a C hristian Kabbalah that was also Hermetic. If magic is not demonic, it may be lawful, says Pico, but it needs Kabbalah to be eff ective. The ­whole point of the Oration was this potent new amalgam of Hebrew and Hellenistic magic, according to Yates. The speech’s opening salute to the h ­ uman miracle led directly, she wrote, to a “eulogy of natu­ral magic,” straight from the Hermetic Asclepius.27 If Pico’s sources ­were “gnostic,” as Yates wrote, the gnosis was peculiar—­ without dualism. The gnosticism revived in the Re­nais­sance, she maintained, sought to make h ­ umans divine by giving them hidden knowledge—­ but with none of the moral and metaphysical pessimism that soured ancient gnostic systems. “The Dignity of Man the Magus in Pico’s famous oration rests on a gnostic text,” and Pico’s conception of man “as operator, having within him the divine creative power, and the magical power of marrying earth to heaven rests on the gnostic heresy that man was once, and can become again through his intellect, . . . ​a divine being, . . . ​[like] the divine Raphael, or the divine Leonardo, or the divine Michelangelo.” Man the Magus is a s elf-­fashioned work of art, a h ybrid phoenix with Burckhardt’s aesthetic longing, Symonds’s po­liti­cal ambition and the Whig foresight that Thorndike could never find in the Re­nais­sance dilettantes whom he denounced as enemies of science.28 If Yates had read Ricardo Bartoli on Pico as a C artesian liberator, she should have cheered the Jacobin friar. In stark contrast to Thorndike, while echoing Cassirer’s language, she declared that in the Oration “man as magus has arrived, . . . ​operating on the cosmos through magia . . . ​[as] the immediate ancestor of the seventeenth-­century scientist.” This makes the “Re­nais­ sance Hermetic tradition . . . ​the immediate antecedent of the emergence of science. . . . ​The Hermetic attitude ­toward the cosmos and ­toward man’s

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relation to the cosmos which Ficino and Pico ­adopted was . . . ​the chief stimulus of that new turning ­toward the world and operating on the world which, appearing first as Re­nais­sance magic, was to turn into seventeenth-­ century science.” ­Great learning, brave imagination, rhapsodic prose, and seductive storytelling made Yates a culture hero by the late sixties, ­after her long c­ areer of inconspicuous scholarship fi­nally beat the long odds in British (or any other) academia against a ­woman with no higher degree. ­Until she died in 1981, she prospered in the pages of the New York Review and at the Warburg Institute, in a small but remarkable com­pany of scholars and ­those who visited their t­ emple of Memory to learn from them. Not every­one applauded, however—­least of all the historians of science who put the “Yates thesis” on Hermetic science into the headlines of learned controversy.29 Books that Yates published a­ fter Giordano Bruno confirm that critics ­were right to doubt her. Still, more than anyone e­ lse, she convinced the Anglo-­American world of learning that magic and the Hermetica w ­ ere issues of g­ reat moment. Almost twenty years a­ fter she died, the Cambridge History of Philosophy published a chapter on the “occultist tradition and its critics” alongside accounts of Descartes, Galileo, Leibniz, and Newton. Another Cambridge History also made magic part of the story of postmedieval science. Magi would never have entered ­these precincts of the acad­ emy without a roadmap from Frances Yates.30 The lasting influence of her work makes it crucial to understand its limitations, especially in Pico’s case. The celebrated opening of the Oration alludes, as she noted, to the Hermetic Asclepius: ‘Magnum, o A sclepi, miraculum est homo.’ The passage of the Asclepius leading up to ­these words treats the ­human condition as intermediate between lower material forms and higher divinities, concluding that ­ uman are they who remain content with the m h ­ iddle status of their kind, and the remaining forms of ­people ­w ill be like ­t hose kinds to whose forms they adjoin themselves. ­Because of this, Asclepius, a ­human being is a g­ reat won­der, a l iving ­t hing to be worshipped and honored: for he changes his nature into a god’s, as if he ­were a god; he knows the demonic kind inasmuch as he recognizes that he originated among them; he despises the part of him that is ­human nature, having put his trust in the divinity of the other part. How much happier is the blend of h ­ uman nature! Conjoined to the gods by a kindred divinity, he despises inwardly that part of him in which he is earthly.



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Following Cassirer, Yates characterized Pico’s “Hermetic attitude” as a “new turning ­toward the world and operating on the world,” and she treated the six words that he took from the Asclepius as a m axim for Re­nais­sance magic. But this passage is not about magic, and Hermes urges his disciple to turn away from the world, not ­toward it. ­After twice commanding Asclepius to despise his h ­ uman part, Trismegistus continues, speaking of higher immaterial forms: All ­others he draws to him in a bond of aff ection, recognizing his relation to them by heaven’s disposition. He looks up to heaven. He has been put in the happier place of m ­ iddle status so that he might cherish t­ hose beneath him and be cherished by ­t hose above him. He cultivates the earth; he swiftly mixes into the ele­ments; he plumbs the depths of the sea in the keenness of his mind. Every­t hing is permitted him: heaven itself seems not too high, for he mea­sures it in his clever thinking as if it ­were nearby. No misty air dims the concentration of his thought; no thick air obstructs his work; no abysmal deep of w ­ ater blocks his lofty view. He is every­t hing, and he is everywhere.

Lifted out of the body, Hermetic initiates can go anywhere and do anything b ­ ecause nothing bodily or material gets in their way. They have the mobility of pure mind, which Pico also wanted.31 Pico’s single reference to the Asclepius—­one of just two mentions in the Oration of Hermes or his retinue—­commits him to none of this hazy context, least of all in a rhetorically loaded preamble. If oratory is the Oration’s weakness, as Dulles claimed, godliness muddled the Asclepius, which like all the Hermetica is long on piety and consolation, short on clarity and consistency. Where Pico’s speech prescribes moral philosophy as a tonic for the soul, the infection is in the lower soul—­“the ­whole sensual part where, so they say, the lure of the body hangs like a noose round the soul’s neck.” This unattributed quotation from the Asclepius preaches body-­ hating, gnostic pessimism—­the dualism that Yates excluded from her Hermetic Re­nais­sance. Like the Asclepius, the Hermetica that Ficino translated are full of this blighted sadness, this loathing of mankind’s material part as “the garment of ignorance, the foundation of vice, the bonds of corruption, the dark cage, the living death, the sentient corpse, the portable tomb, the resident thief, the one who hates through what he loves and envies through what he hates. Such is the odious tunic you have put on. It strangles you and drags you down, . . . ​blocked up with a ­great load of

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­ atter and jammed full of loathsome plea­sure.” On the moral status of the m body and the natu­ral world—so impor­tant for post-­Kantian modernism and the modern reception of Pico’s Oration—­the Greek Hermetica and the Latin Asclepius are both wildly inconsistent: Hermetic scholarship is littered with theories that fail to resolve the incoherence.32 Pico cited the Asclepius b ­ ecause he too wanted to change his “nature into a god’s, as if he ­were a god, . . . ​despising the part of him that is ­human nature.” This is the aim of the curriculum proposed by the Oration, which plots a path through moral philosophy, dialectic and natu­ral philosophy ­toward a theology known only to the initiate who wants to die in the body in order to live as the supreme Mind. Pico presented Adam as empowered by God before the Fall to soar with angels or crawl with insects. But God then commanded the fallen Adam’s ­children to live the cherubic life—­the disembodied and disgendered existence of the next-­to-­highest angels. (Pico wears their emblem on the Niccolò Fiorentino medal.) The Asclepius attracted the prince b ­ ecause it turned away from the world, not t­ oward it. But to support magic in the Oration, the orator never used the Asclepius at all—­despite Yates’s claims to the contrary.33 Pico had a g­ reat deal to say about magic in the Oration, Conclusions, and Apology, but the magic was not Hermetic. The Hermetica best known to the prince w ­ ere the Latin Asclepius and the Greek treatises translated by Ficino, so this is unsurprising, given that ­these works are not about magic—­contra Yates. Their subject is theology in the broadest sense, to serve the pious in their devotional needs. This Greco-­Egyptian religiosity attracted Re­nais­sance Christians ­because the sacred texts revered by Hermetic writers, who knew the Mosaic Genesis, also included Gospels and Epistles. ­Later writings attributed to Hermes—­the Picatrix, Emerald Tablet, Book of Hermes on the Six Princi­ples of Nature, and ­others—­a lso circulated in Pico’s time and before: their subjects are, indeed, alchemy, astrology, and practical magic. But ­these ‘technical’ Hermetica—­unlike the ‘theoretical’ lit­er­a­ture now read as the Corpus Hermeticum and partly translated by Ficino—­are collections of ­recipes and lists of arcane information without intellectual ambition.34 In the theoretical Hermetica, the two longest statements about magic come from the Latin Asclepius that Ficino did not need to translate. ­These are ‘god-­making’ passages on animating statues with magic practiced in Egyptian t­ emples and explained by Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and ­others. An En­glish version of the Asclepius (the longest Hermetic text



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studied by Ficino and his friends) fills about twenty-­five printed pages, and the two passages would fit on two of them. In both cases, as in the opening words of the Oration, the starting point is admiration for mankind, this time ­because ­humans can make gods, meaning “statues ensouled and conscious, filled with spirit and ­doing ­great deeds; statues that foreknow the ­future and predict it by lots, by prophecy, by dreams and by many other means; statues that make p ­ eople ill and cure them, bringing them pain and plea­sure as each deserves.” In days of old, Egypt neglected her gods, ­until ­later generations learned to discover the divine nature and how to make it. . . . ​Using a power arising from the nature of m ­ atter, . . . ​t hey could not make souls, so they mixed this power in and called up the souls of demons or angels and implanted them in likenesses through holy and divine mysteries, whence the idols could have the power to do good and evil. . . . ​Anger comes easily to earthly and material gods ­because ­humans have made and assembled them from both natures. Whence it happens that ­t hese are called holy animals by the Egyptians, who throughout their cities worship the souls of t­ hose deified while alive. . . . ​­These gods are entertained with constant sacrifices . . . ​so that the heavenly ingredient enticed into the idol . . . ​may gladly endure its long stay among humankind. Thus does man fashion his gods.

Pagan gods endured h ­ uman com­pany without liking it, appeased by idolatry, demonolatry, animal worship, and divinized ancestors: to find practices more repugnant to Chris­tian­ity would be hard. This alone would explain why Pico never mentioned this material from the Asclepius (or any other Hermetica) when he defended natu­ral magic and rejected demonic ritual in the Oration. Moreover, since both god-­making passages start with the theme of h ­ uman won­der that Pico knew from elsewhere in the Asclepius and used to start the Oration, avoiding t­ hese texts was prob­ably intentional—to keep his magic natu­ral. The Conclusions restate his distinction between natu­ral and demonic magic but pay l­ ittle attention to Hermes. Just 10 of the 900 t­ heses belong to Mercurius Trismegistus: one elides divination with prophecy, one is a “secret” about Kabbalah, and none mentions magic.35 But magic and Kabbalah help mortals achieve u ­ nion with God, according to Pico, and this is the aim of his Oration. Magic enters his curriculum as natu­ral philosophy ascends ­toward natu­ral theology, and then with

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Kabbalah, at a higher level, helps h ­ umans change into angels and merge with God. Kabbalah shows the way to u ­ nion, though the willfully esoteric Oration shows ­little about Kabbalah. But comparing the Oration with the Conclusions and their sources reveals that Pico’s speech is abundantly Kabbalist—­though not Hermetic, ­after the opening flourish of oratory.36 Nor does Pico see mankind’s destiny as heroic, if heroism is the kind associated with the ­human dignity and freedom discovered in the Oration by modern readers. Even before Pico became a liberal, Lessing, followed by Goethe, had started to make Faustus Romantic. This is the Faustus that Frances Yates looked for—­but could not find—in Christopher Marlowe’s play: “a heroic individual soul, struggling with prob­lems of magic or science versus religion.” What she found instead was a “piece of propaganda” aimed at a Re­nais­sance whose heroes (before Bruno) ­were Pico and Ficino—­prophets of modern science, she insisted, and priests of cultural pro­gress ­because of their magic, not despite it. Seeing Marlowe’s play as a “dismissal of . . . ​Re­nais­sance magic and science,” she pits his dissolute wizard against t­ hese learned magi. In Pico’s case, the contrast is fair enough, but only up to a point. Faustus found philosophy “odious and obscure” even before magic ravished him, and then he abandoned any ascetic regimen like Pico’s for cheap tricks and sex. But Faustus, while still a “studious artisan” who thought that a “sound magician is a demi-­god,” fantasized about angel magic. As Yates observed, he conjures angels as the play opens. Desiring a “world of profit and delight, of power, of honor, and omnipotence,” he quickly turned to dev­ils and Kabbalah—­“Jehovah’s name forward and backward anagrammatized.” In the end, what he got was death and damnation. What he wanted was power over this world, however, not death and removal from it, which was Pico’s aim. This diff erence makes Pico not Faustian, not a Romantic hero and not modern or liberal, not the author of our Oration on the Dignity of Man, a speech that we have written about ourselves.37

4. ​Festivities Again in Mirandola In 1994, admirers of Pico gathered for a fourth time in Mirandola—as they had in 1963, 1894, and 1789—to honor him and assess his accomplishments. At least for the rec­ord, this fifth centennial of his death—­unlike the 1894 event—­sparked no sniping from the local organizers. When the papers had all been read, according to Vittorio Erlindo, the proceedings



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­ ere “magisterially concluded by Cesare Vasoli,” a s tudent of Eugenio w Garin and his successor as head of Italy’s National Institute for Re­nais­ sance Studies. Erlindo coordinated the events and wrote a cronaca of the five days, describing Vasoli’s words on the final Saturday as the “perfect end for a m eeting that many w ­ ill remember as foundational for f­ uture research.” More than ten years l­ater, however, complaints about “numerous uncritical general statements” came from the other end of the world, regretting the “resilience of traditional formulae and expectations, still accepted without question or comment.”38 The protest came from William Craven—­now deceased—­who taught history at the Australian National University. 1n 1981, the year Frances Yates died, he had published a book about “modern interpreters” of Pico as a “symbol of his age.” Yates was a secondary target, among many o ­ thers, for this perceptive debunker of the twentieth-­century consensus: his main target was Garin, along with Cassirer. Swimming against tides—or torrents—of authority, Craven presented Pico as a philosophical ascetic who opposed humanism, ignored the Hermetica, and had no philosophy of man. The Oration says nothing about ­human nature, he declared, not to speak of autonomy or dignity. The ­theses introduced by the speech show only the “degeneracy and triviality of late scholasticism,” and the author himself was nothing special. Noting that Pico’s advocates had “brushed aside” another contrarian, Avery Dulles, Craven described the young man’s findings as a “very considerable advance.”39 Many reviews of Craven’s book ­were positive, some enthusiastic. Kristeller, polite as always, called it “bold and in­ter­est­ing.” “Careful,” “convincing,” and “sound,” wrote Charles Trinkaus, another eminence from Kristeller’s generation. Since the responses w ­ ere so good and Craven’s findings so far from the mainstream, experts on Pico should have kept the book in their sights. But only two of forty-­five speakers at the 1994 festivities—­Michael Allen and Jader Jacobelli—­spent even a few words on this “brilliant but combative study” with its “strange and singular revisionism.” The author himself was not pre­sent, as far as the rec­ord shows.40 But three luminaries, from France, Germany, and Italy, w ­ ere t­ here to give keynote talks in Mirandola’s Teatro Nuovo on the opening Tuesday: like almost every­one ­else, they ignored Craven while repeating tried but untrue claims that he—­with support from reviewers—­had nullified. According to August Buck, the “title eventually given to the Oration is

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still correct since Pico makes a conscious connection with the traditional lit­er­a­ture on ­human dignity.” Umberto Eco—­fresh from ἀ e Name of the Rose—­talked about Kabbalah and Lullism, esoteric experiments that showed Pico ready “to dare, to discover, in keeping with his affirmation of the dignity and rights of man.” Jacques le Goff , an expert on medieval intellectuals, traced the Oration’s ideas to the twelfth c­ entury but also confirmed that the speech “expresses the heart of Pico’s thought,” which in the “lay world of the Quattrocento” was “thoroughly humanist.” 41 Perhaps some speakers, Italians especially, slighted Craven b ­ ecause he had threatened Garin’s legacy: the ­great man lived ten years more ­after the fifth centennial; he had written the book on Pico; and, with Kristeller, he had defined Pico’s era. When the day came for new assessments—­ October 4, 1994—­Garin opened the proceedings with a prolusione, brief but in the g­ rand style, delivered before Buck, Eco, and Le Goff spoke. Nodding to the older lit­er­a­ture but sticking to his own time, he saw more than one Pico ­there. He also recertified Cassirer’s certification of Burckhardt’s finding that “the speech on the dignity of man” was “one of the noblest legacies” of the Re­nais­sance. Closing his own oration, he concluded that God’s oratory to Adam in Pico’s address celebrates the “liberation” that gives h ­ uman life its only meaning. Familiar pieties—­repeated by dignitaries to a pac ked house—­had scriptural force, too much for Craven’s slim book to overcome. His “combative but often inadequate study” rates only a short, squeamish footnote in the most recent En­glish version of the Oration, published in 2012.42 Presiding at the Mirandola meeting, Garin was not at all combative, saying nothing about Craven’s frontal attack. He already had his say in a review of the Italian version of the off ending book, which appeared ten years before the centennial. Craven’s eff ort was a waste of ink and time, he charged: putting it into Italian could be explained only by a “wild lust for translating”; what motivated the publisher of the original En­glish work must have been “personal dislike” for Pico. Other­wise, having just a few pages, Garin could only deny what Craven asserted. He decried his opponent’s treatment of Pico as harsh special pleading and charged that his conclusions ­were ungrounded. Craven paid too l­ ittle attention to primary texts, Garin complained, including ­those edited by Garin, and Craven was ignorant of other impor­tant studies—­new material on Kabbalah by Chaim Wirszubski, for example.43



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Wirszubski was an Israeli classicist who studied Roman po­liti­cal ideas—­ including dignitas. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem was one of his teachers, and in the 1960s he started to write about Pico and Kabbalah as well. Then he died in 1977, before his book was ready. Moshe Idel prepared it for the press—­Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism—­and Harvard fi­nally brought it out in 1989, with an introduction by Kristeller. Had Wirszubski’s groundbreaking study appeared ten years e­ arlier, in time for Craven to see it, objections to the standard line on Pico—to Garin’s views, especially—­might have changed more minds.44 Before Wirszubski decoded the manuscripts that show how Pico learned about Kabbalah, no one—­not even a critic as bold as Craven—­could read the Oration as what it is: a mystic’s manifesto for ascent, by way of magic and Kabbalah, to self-­annihilating ­union with God. Craven saw that the main structure of the speech, ­after the flashy opening, is curricular, but he undervalued the role of Pico’s magic and Kabbalah—­final steps in the paideia before unification and deification. The prince’s infamous claim that magic and Kabbalah prove Christ’s divinity was evidence merely of his “credulity and a taste for the arcane.” Kabbalah was nothing but fireworks—­“a young man’s oratorical pyrotechnics.” Pico’s only real interest in it was apol­o­getic—­ “against the Jews”—­and it gave him no new ideas. With so ­little at stake, Craven simply excluded the sources of Pico’s Kabbalah from his proj­ect—­the unedited texts that made Wirszubski’s book so compelling.45 Compelling—­but not easy reading. One obstacle was the book’s subject ­matter: Kabbalah. For most of the twentieth c­ entury, scholars had relied on Scholem’s pioneering work to unriddle its mysteries: he published his thesis on the Bahir, a charter text of Kabbalah, in 1923, and his g­ reat survey of the subject, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, appeared in En­glish in 1941. But it was Moshe Idel who first explained—­though not comprehensively u ­ ntil 2007—­the Kabbalah of Pico’s time and place. Without the framework established by Idel, readers had no general orientation to help them situate Wirszubski’s case-­by-­case particulars. His first chapter drills straight down into marginalia from a Book of Redemption to show how Pico could have “strug­gled through some easy pages of Kabbalah.” But Wirszubski himself wrote no easy pages. The Book of Redemption, as it turns out, was a Latin version, made for Pico, of a Sefer Ge’ullah by (most likely) Abraham Abulafia, the most impor­tant Kabbalist of all for the prince’s purposes. Wirszubski’s book—­never finished by its author—­

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delays this crucial information for eighty pages a­ fter using the recondite material to make revelations about Pico. Right from the start, the book pre­sents a de tailed—­often minutely detailed—­analy­sis of evidence like the Latin Book of Redemption. Still unedited and untranslated, this text is part of a Vatican manuscript, one of dozens that preserve works of Kabbalah used by Pico when he was writing the Oration and Conclusions. Wirszubski dug into t­ hese impenetrable old books, none of which had been well studied at the time. While commenting on them, he rarely translated e­ ither their nonstandard Latin or the Hebrew and Aramaic words, phrases, and paragraphs—­sometimes transliterated in the originals, sometimes not—­that they interpret.46 Experts on Pico have been slow to digest Wirszubski’s findings, despite their importance and maybe b ­ ecause of their originality. A c ollection about the prince from 2008, published almost twenty years a­ fter Wirszubski’s book, includes no chapter on Kabbalah: of three authors who discuss the topic, one (like Craven) fights off the “temptation to explore what Pico’s sources actually had said”—­the very texts examined by Wirszubski. The same author prefers “the spelling Cabala, as most scholars do, b ­ ecause it is questionable w ­ hether Pico practiced au­then­tic Kabbalah.” But when Kabbalah dispenses with authenticity, like jazz freed from a composer’s score, nothing is lost: the Zohar’s author, writing in the thirteenth ­century, claimed authenticity for his own work by ascribing it to a rabbi of the second ­century. Nevertheless, truth, accuracy, and completeness are good t­ hings—­values that Wirszubski lived by—­though his book has made few converts among students of Pico. The En­glish version of the Oration published in 2012 opens a c hapter of “interpretations” with a roll call of the prince’s most esteemed interpreters in the twentieth c­ entury—­Cassirer, Garin, Gentile, Kristeller, and so on. Wirszubski—­the first to unlock the mysteries of the celebrated speech—­did not make the list, even though Francesco Bausi had already applied Wirszubski’s findings in his superb edition. Giulio Busi and his colleagues have also launched the Kabbalistic Library of Giovanni Pico—­a series presenting valuable editions and translations of manuscripts studied by Wirszubski, as well as other texts. With Wirszubski’s book and Bausi’s edition complete, and with Busi’s series in pro­gress, reasons not to take Pico’s Kabbalah seriously are fewer now than ever.47

t h r ee

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11

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Pico Orates The prudence of the prudent ­shall be hid. —­i sa i a h

1. ​Secrets and Codes Silence and secrecy are methods in the Oration, a speech that hides much of its message. Any translation, including Appendix A of this book, w ­ ill be opaque ­because the original is opaque. Not much is explicit. ­Things stand for other t­ hings—­a llusions buried in allusions, obscure phrases hinting at sacred truths. The text resists exposition and sometimes defies it. For Christians in Pico’s day, Jewish mysteries w ­ ere unapproachable—­ not the Law made public on Sinai but its interpretation, which God ordered Moses not to reveal: “It was a ­matter of divine command,” according to Pico, “to keep secret from the populace what should be told to the perfect.” This sacred rule was biblical. “The Lord’s secret is with them that fear him,” according to Maimonides, yet only a few know how to read the Bible and fear God. If ­those “ignorant of Scripture’s secret meaning . . . ​could only fathom the Law’s inner intent, they would realize that the essence of true and holy religion lies in the deeper meaning.”1 No phi­los­o­pher spoke to Jews with more authority than Maimonides, and the habit of secrecy that he and Pico shared was not entirely eccentric in philosophy—­though secrecy was not the way of most Christian phi­los­ o­phers. And during the prince’s lifetime, few Christians saw his secrets displayed in the Conclusions. The 900 ­theses introduced by the Oration ­were printed only once with Pico’s consent—in Rome by Eucharius Silber on December  7, 1486—in an unpaginated book (now rare) with no title 339

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page. A notice at the top of the first sheet names the author and announces that he “­will dispute his own views in public . . . ​about the statements listed, numbering nine hundred.” On the ­fourteenth sheet another notice labels a distinct group, “numbering five hundred,” of ­those 900 ­theses.2 Pico intended to pre­sent 900 propositions (the Oration confirms this figure four times) in groups of 400 and 500. The two groups (T1 and T2 for short; see Appendix B) contain 39 smaller sets, each (except one) with a headnote giving the number of t­ heses in the set. Each thesis is marked with a pilcrow (¶) to indicate a new statement. But the t­ heses are not numbered, and some have corollaries, marked in the same way: treating the corollaries as t­ heses (or not) changes the counts. The posthumous edition of the Conclusions published in 1532 without a place or publisher’s name skips the corollaries and numbers ­every thesis, for a total of 900. In the 1532 book, as in 1486, the heading of the final set as printed (compare the emended text in Appendix C.19) is Kabbalist Conclusions Numbering 71 According to My Own Opinion, Providing Power­f ul Confirmation of the Christian Religion from the Very Princi­ples of Hebrew Sages. 3 Although the 1532 edition repeats ­these words, 72 numbered ­theses, not 71, follow the heading, and 72 was surely the author’s intention. ­Unless he had understood this number’s significance in Kabbalah, he could not have discussed a method “for deriving the Name of 72 letters from the ineff able Name.” Both names are divine. The Name that may not be spoken—­the Tetragrammaton, a four-­lettered name—is yhw h. The less august name of 72 emerges from three verses of Exodus 14, each with exactly 72 letters. Aligned and read vertically, the letters spell 72 names of angels with three letters each, and all 216 spell out a name of God. The required method of reading, known to Pico, exploits a feature of Hebrew script, where ­every letter (like the Roman letter a) is also a numeral (like the Arabic numeral 1) that stands for a number: b ­ ecause alef ‫א‬, bet ‫ב‬, gimel ‫ג‬, and so on in the Hebrew alphabet are both numerals and letters, e­ very Hebrew word has numerical values.4 Also, b ­ ecause the Bible’s Hebrew text is the word of a G od who does nothing useless, ­every letter and number and even all their shapes and parts have meaning. As Pico puts it, scripture contains no signs “whose forms, ligatures, separations, twisting, direction, defect, excess, smallness, greatness, crowning, closing, opening and order do not reveal secrets.” He



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used this code in his Conclusions, but the single crude edition that he produced himself makes his t­ heses less intelligible by not numbering them. B ­ ecause the Oration cannot be understood without the ­theses, I have used another code—­a simpler one—to track them: see Appendix B. The notation explained t­ here labels the following thesis (for example) as number 63 of the set about Kabbalah (K) in group T2. T2K63 ​Just as Aristotle himself concealed ­under the guise of philosophical speculation and obscured by terse expression the more divine philosophy that ancient phi­los­o­phers veiled u ­ nder fables and stories, so Rabbi Moses of Egypt in the book that Latins call the Guide for the Perplexed embraces mysteries of Kabbalah through hidden interpretations of deep meaning while seeming through the outer bark of words to proceed philosophically.5

This thesis claims that both Aristotle and Rabbi Moses used philosophy to disguise an ancient theology. Rabbi Moses is Rambam, Moses Maimonides, the most eminent Jewish Aristotelian and an authority also honored by Kabbalists—­like Pico, who called himself a Kabbalist. His first 47 ­theses on Kabbalah reveal secrets of “Hebrew Kabbalist sages”; the final 72 are his own ­theses inspired by a larger group of wise men, “Hebrew sages,” ­whether they w ­ ere Kabbalists or not. The culminating sets of t­ heses in both groups, T1 and T2, are about Kabbalah.6 The Oration says less in detail about Hebrew sages than the Apology, where Pico tried to prove that Jewish wisdom was Chris­tian­ity’s best defense again Jewish treachery. “It was the view of Rabbi Eliezer,” he explained, “of Rabbi Moses of Egypt, Rabbi Shimon ben Laqis, Rabbi Ishmael, Rabbi Iodam and Rabbi Nachman . . . ​and our teachers as well . . . ​that in addition to the Law that God gave Moses on the mountain, . . . ​a true explanation of the Law was revealed along with an exposition of all the mysteries and secrets contained u ­ nder the bark of the Law and the rough appearance of its words.” Jews had long had their own version of the four ways of reading scripture used by Christians. Pico described the first as the literal way they call peshat, maintained among them by Rabbi Chamai and Rabbi Shlomo. The allegorical is Midrash, and you ­w ill often hear them discussing . . . ​a Midrash or mystical account of Ruth, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes and other books: teachers of Talmud especially followed this procedure. What they call sheqel is the tropological way

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followed by Abraham Ibn Ezra (where his exposition is not literal), Levi ben Gerson and, most of all, Rabbi Moses. The anagogical way is called Kabbalah. . . . ​This is loftier and more divine than the ­others, leading us up from earthly ­t hings to the heavens. . . . ​From this we get the strongest evidence against the Jews . . . ​­because conflicts between them and us arise almost entirely from their following the letter that kills while we follow the life-­giving spirit.7

In thesis T2K1, Pico promoted his own views against “what­ever the rest of the Kabbalists may say.” No Christian before him had ever engaged or challenged this Jewish tradition so aggressively on such a wide front. He did not claim to be a s age, however, like Maimonides or Gersonides—­ Rabbi Levi ben Gerson, Ralbag. Neither Ralbag nor Rambam was a Kabbalist: both w ­ ere Aristotelian rationalists, and Gersonides was a naturalist as well. All the Jewish sages known to Pico—­Kabbalists or not, phi­los­o­ phers or not—­had secrets for him to find. The Guide for the Perplexed, Rambam’s most famous work, was available in a medieval Latin version, like some of Ralbag’s books. Writings by Abraham Abulafia ­were even more valuable to Pico. B ­ ecause ­there ­were no Latin versions of Abulafia’s writings, the prince commissioned translations by a converted Jew, Shmuel bin Nissim Abulfaraj (Farachio), who called himself Flavius Mithridates and lived up to his showy alias.8 The Christian scholastic philosophy that Pico also studied was mainly public or exoteric: beginners could learn its princi­ples from textbooks. Kabbalah, an esoteric tradition, produced few such introductions. But one work by Abulafia that Flavius translated came closer than ­others to serving this purpose: And ἀi s to Yehuda is its title—­Ve-­zot li-­Yehuda. In form it is a letter, and the recipient was Rabbi Yehuda Salmon: when Abulafia sent the letter a­ fter 1287, he was in trou­ble for claiming to be the Messiah. The blasphemy had enraged Spain’s most power­ful rabbi—­Shlomo ben Abraham ibn Adret, the Rashba—­who excommunicated him. Abulafia then wrote to Rabbi Yehuda to defend himself and to describe the type of Kabbalah that stoked his Messianic fires. To defend his beliefs he explained them, as few Kabbalists did. A Brief Summary of Kabbalah, the title that Flavius gave to the letter in Latin, declared an intention rarely seen in the lit­er­a­ture of Kabbalah, whose foundational texts—­books of Brightness and Splendor, the Bahir and the Zohar—­are not welcoming to beginners. Flavius translated the Bahir for



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Pico, who knew material from the Zohar as well, if only indirectly through another translation (now lost) by Flavius—­a Latinized Commentary on the Pentateuch by Menahem Recanati. The prince had no translation of the Zohar, apparently, and perhaps he could not have handled its difficult Aramaic. But he had Recanati’s Zoharic commentaries, and Abulafia’s letter was even more useful b ­ ecause it was brief and introductory: the Latin translation of the letter by Flavius was priceless.9 Even though Abulafia aimed to be expository in Ve-­zot, his idiom was like Talmud or Midrash—­shorthand for readers who had mastered the same texts, starting with the Bible, and had internalized the same conventions of communication. Describing the Mishnah, the canon of rules explicated by the Talmud, a modern expert calls its questions “internal to a system that is never introduced, . . . ​providing information without establishing context. . . . ​We join a c onversation already long underway about topics we can never grasp.” Abulafia’s letter is Talmudic in this sense. Its first words are “You have loved justice and hated wickedness”—­instantly recognizable by the writer’s friends and enemies as quoting a Psalm. The words open the letter’s preface, a medley of fifteen propositions from the Bible and Talmud, seemingly disjointed but woven into acrostic verse and selected to highlight grievances against the Rashba, Abulafia’s attacker. Then the letter introduces—­but does not define—­two ‘secrets,’ one about the ‘ladder,’ another about ‘impregnation.’ Next Abulafia singles out teachers whose views on t­ hese ­matters he re­spects ­because they understand “the secret of the levirate from the mystery of Judah and Tamar, his daughter-­ in-­law, together with Er and Onan and Shela, and from the mystery of Elimelech and Naomi and Mahlon and Chilion, along with Boaz and Ruth, and also the secret of the text that says a son was born to Naomi, and from similar m ­ atters in the mystery that says Moses was conceived in the secret of Abel. It is only they who know the secret of the ladder.” This composite of allusions to three dif­fer­ent books of the Bible (Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Ruth) combines t­ hese references with a few quoted passages to produce a message about Abulafia’s ladder. But what does the story of Er, Onan, and Shelah in one chapter of Genesis have to do with Jacob’s dream in a dif­fer­ent chapter, and how does ­either narrative connect with the stories of Judah and Tamar or Ruth and Naomi? Abulafia and his teachers and students had answers to t­ hese questions, expressed in writing that was impenetrable—­except to readers like themselves. One such reader was Pico—or so he hoped—­a beginner who bought Targums, Talmud,

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Midrashim, and conventional commentaries on scripture as well as books of Kabbalah.10 He collected books by Abulafia and other Kabbalists and paid for translations in order to learn their secrets, and in the Oration he imitated their way of writing. Similar mandarin practices ­were familiar to him from Greek and Latin classics and their Quattrocento imitators. Poliziano’s philology and the philosophy of Proclus, like Abulafia’s mysticism, made ­great demands on readers—­even on experts. Pico, a snob about secrets, valued Kabbalah just b ­ ecause of its difficulty: if you need to ask, you ­don’t deserve to know. Exclusionary arrogance came easily to the prince, whose passion for secrecy was reinforced by ­every page of Kabbalah that he studied, not just by Abulafia’s writings. The Zohar influenced him, for example, though perhaps not directly. Consider a passage typical not only of that famous book but of many works of Kabbalah. While studying a portion of Leviticus, two rabbis start a discussion about “Solomon’s bed” and “sixty warriors” in a passage from the Song of Songs. Before returning to the phrase in question, they fill two pages with a hunt for its meaning through eleven other books of the Bible. One rabbi then stops to “focus on supernal m ­ atters, to unify the Holy Name,” and the item scrutinized is a single word, ‘this’—­zot (‫ )זאת‬in Hebrew—­from a passage of Leviticus, “with this ­shall Aaron enter the sanctuary,” taking “this” to refer to God’s Name. Then the rabbi continues: From this place one must revere the blessed Holy One. Thus it is written [in Deut. 32:29] ­were they wise, they would contemplate this (zot) and immediately understand their final end. That is, if ­people would consider how this (zot) is linked with all Her forces . . . ​t hey would immediately understand their final end. . . . ​If a p erson succeeds in learning Torah and observes it, then this (zot) protects him and makes a covenant with him, . . . ​as it is written [Isa. 59:21]: As for Me, this (zot) is My covenant with them. Then the rabbis sat down to eat.

As Pico learned from such scholars, the ­little zot was a mighty power and a divine ­woman—­hence “all Her forces” in the passage cited. This par­tic­u­ lar reading developed a type of Kabbalah favored by Abulafia’s opponents, but he and his enemies often expressed their teachings in similar ways, and Pico wrote most of his Oration in their bewildering style.11 One description that Abulafia used for his own Kabbalah was the “path of twenty-­two letters” leading to “knowledge of the g­ reat Name”—­the



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Name that is God himself. He charged that other Kabbalists had chosen a detour, “the way of ten Numerations.” Having taken the wrong road, t­ hese “masters of the Kabbalah of Numerations” profaned the sacred by disclosing the “secret of unity” and distorting it. “A master of Numerations w ­ ill call them by par­tic­u­lar names as he chooses. He ­will say that the first Numeration is called Thought, and he w ­ ill add another name to it to clarify its mystery. He ­will call it the Supreme Crown, . . . ​and the explanation ­will grow by applying another name to it.”12 One round of arbitrary name-­ giving leads to another: this is part of Abulafia’s complaint. The Numerationes of his letter in Latin are Sefirot in Hebrew: the singular is Sefirah, feminine in gender. The highest Sefirah is called the Crown, the first manifestation of nameless and endless divinity, the No-­End (’Eyn-­sof). Kabbalists believe that this Hidden God reveals himself not only in the Bible but also through ten such emanations or attributes, the Sefirot. Hypostasized in myths, made concrete by images, and symbolized by letters and numbers, they are at the core of Kabbalist storytelling, which also discusses God’s names and their echoes in words of scripture.13 Kabbalists treat God’s sacred speech, the Hebrew text of the Bible, as infinite in meaning, significant even in its smallest parts—­not only the sacred words but also their letters (which are also numerals) and even the shapes and parts of letters. The most power­ful words are God’s names: the holiest name, yhw h, cannot be uttered; by proxy it is pronounced Adonai, a speak­ thers in the Hebrew Bible. able name like Ehyeh, Elohim, El Shaddai, and o Other words of ­great power are names of Sefirot, unknown as such to the Bible; they are names not of God but of God’s aspects or actions or manifestations. God in his highest essence remains hidden, and finite creatures can know the Infinite only as it descends from its secret heights. The last moments of descent have formed the world of h ­ uman awareness. The first moments, far beyond ­human perception, are the Sefirot (Figure 17). Books of Kabbalah often depict the Sefirot as a ‘tree’ with a central trunk and branches to the (viewer’s) right and left. Their number is ten, but the highest has two aspects: the Crown or No-­End, hidden at S1a, also shows itself as Knowledge at S1b. Each Sefirah has many names, some used more often than ­others. Familiar designations of S4, for example, are Greatness and Love or Piety. The divine name usually associated with S4 is El, but Pico knew that other words and names (Abraham, Michael, the South, ­Water) belong t­ here as well. He was the first Christian to discover t­ hese secrets, re­spect them, trea­sure them—­and then turn them against their

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creators. Flavius, his most prolific in­for­mant, translated (and mistranslated) thousands of pages of Kabbalah for him. But no Christian con­temporary of theirs could have seen how Kabbalah ­shaped the Oration. The abstruse style and esoteric method of the speech, emphatically proclaimed by the author, distance it from much of Western philosophy—­especially outside the Platonic tradition—as Pico himself understood. In 1485, in a famous exchange with Ermolao Barbaro, he took philosophy’s side against rhe­ toric, which he dismissed as trickery with words—­“pure lies, pure fakery, pure illusion”—­ whereas the phi­los­o­pher’s “­every eff ort aims to know the truth and show it to o ­ thers. . . . ​Phi- Figure 17. ​Ten Sefirot in the losophy pre­sents herself naked, vis­i­ble from all usual array. sides and to ­every eye, ready to be questioned.” A year or so ­after his reply to Barbaro, the orator claimed to be ­doing philosophy in a new Oration, where his call for secrecy was a r emarkable reversal—­but entirely in keeping with Jewish mysteries that he had learned in the meantime.14 Theology and devotional practice are the main topics of Pico’s Kabbalah, which shows (or hints) how God reveals himself in the Sefirot, the divine names and words of scripture. In the 72 t­ heses at the finale of the Conclusions, Kabbalah becomes Christology and Trinitarian theology. The Sefirot and God’s names are actors in dramas of theology, cosmology, angelology, and anthropology whose themes are exile, death, atonement, and redemption—­stories that Pico transposes onto the Christian Trinity and Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Devotional practices described by the Conclusions are not just prayer and ritual but also mystical ascent to ­union with God—­the ­union also urged by the Oration, where magic and Kabbalah are final steps of ascent. The t­ heses show in more detail than the speech how magic connects with Kabbalah as a spiritual technique—­like theurgy in Neoplatonic philosophy—to open routes to God ordinarily closed to h ­ umans. Practicing Kabbalah relies on a theory that reveals t­ hese channels of divinity to the few and interprets them while also keeping them hidden from the many.15



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2. ​Abulafia’s Ladder Maimonides was not a Kabbalist, despite the claims of some interpreters, but when he explained scriptural mysteries, he also guarded them. Biblical prophecy was one of the “secrets and mysteries of the Torah” that he interpreted in light of Muslim versions of Aristotle’s metaphysical psy­chol­ogy. At the lowest level of the hypercosmic hierarchy, still beyond the vis­i­ble heavens, an Agent (or Active) Intellect transmits forms that descend from God for bodily creatures to cognize—­though in a blinkered way. For all ­humans, this single Intellect is the sole vehicle not just of prophecy but of all real understanding. P ­ eople connect with it only a­ fter preparing their souls. Except for Moses, all prophets ­were informed by the Agent Intellect through their faculties of imagination—­according to Maimonides—­but this was a secret to be shielded. Secrets show up through images, however, like the ladders, pillars, and vertical lines that Kabbalists used to picture mystical ascent to the Intellect. Bodies, souls, or minds might take this trip, on external or internal voyages, ending or not ending in bodily death. Ascent and descent might be just meta­phors for inner psychological states. But Abulafia interpreted remarks by Maimonides as indicating a r eal (though not bodily) u ­ nion between ­human minds and the Intellect, and Kabbalists of Abulafia’s school applied the image of the ladder to the pro­cess of unifying. Abulafia himself described the ladder when he wrote to Rabbi Yehuda: “All the prophets . . . ​ and all the ancients of the gentile sages made inquiry, wishing to know the level and the height of the ladder of the soul, from the lowest to the very top. And they have expressed it as best they could. . . . ​By one who understands let it be understood—­the secret of the truth of impregnation that lies between separation and conjunction.” Many want to ascend, says Abulafia, but few climb far enough to experience the “secret of impregnation.” He adds that even Kabbalists miss the deepest mystery—­conjunction with the Intellect, or S10—if they think that this secret is the transmigration of souls. To make ­human souls prophetic, S10—­the Shekinah, She Who Dwells—­impregnates them. As her androgynous power flows into them like semen, she helps h ­ uman souls contemplate letters and numbers of the divine names in order to conceive Understanding (S3). ­After hearing God speak from on high through this Intellect, the mystic becomes the Intellect. As Pico wrote in a t hesis on Plotinus, “­human happiness is supreme when our par­tic­u­lar intellect is fully and

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wholly conjoined with the First Intellect.” This blissful drowning of a merely ­human self in the depths of the Godhead is the mystic’s reward for climbing the ladder.16 Abulafia’s ecstatic mysticism opposed yet relied on conventional medieval philosophy—­conventional but controversial. Building on a f ew remarks by Aristotle, the phi­los­o­pher’s pagan commentators in late antiquity had inspired medieval Muslim sages to develop theories of the soul that reached Christian Eu­rope only ­after the twelfth ­century—­theories explicated by Avicenna and other pre­de­ces­sors of Maimonides but also by Averroes, his con­temporary. According to Averroes, only one entity, a single Intellect, understands universals, as distinct from perceiving particulars. This divine m ­ ental act—­immaterial, unchanging, and eternal—­has no objects that are material and bodily. Moreover, the unique Intellect’s eternity does individual h ­ umans no good. Although the Intellect is one, ­there are as many ­human souls as ­human bodies, and e­ very soul perishes with its body. Besides, just b ­ ecause a ­human self is embodied and merely particular—­unlike the bodiless Intellect and its universal thoughts—­mystical extinction of a s elf is no ­great loss: just the reverse, in fact. In a Letter on the Possibility of Conjunction, Averroes wrote that “the ­human soul’s ultimate happiness . . . ​is in its final ascent. When I s ay ‘ascent,’ I m ean that the soul is perfected and ennobled to be conjoined and united with a separated Intellect and become one with it, and this beyond doubt is the final step of its ascent. . . . ​This is an activity that the Agent Intellect produces in us, which is why the Intellect is called ‘agent.’ ” This Letter on ‘conjunction’ survived only in Hebrew, but Elia del M edigo—­a Jew who taught Pico about Averroes—no doubt discussed the mystery with him. Two ­theses by the prince on Averroes reflect the Letter’s conception of bliss as the individual soul’s annihilation in the perfectly unitary divine Mind: T1Avr2 ​In all ­humans ­t here is a single intellective soul. T1Avr3 ​Supreme ­human happiness comes when the Agent Intellect connects with a potential intellect as its form.

Such a theory of soul and mind—­long before 1550 when the Letter by Averroes could fi­nally be read in Latin—­was a menace for Christian Aristotelians, who denounced the w ­ hole philosophical framework of ‘Averroism.’ Although Thomas Aquinas and o ­ thers contested Averroist doctrines, the



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teachings survived. In the early 1480s Pico studied them in Padua with Elia, who also gave him access to works by Averroes that Christians had never seen. U ­ ntil the end of 1486, Elia also worked with the prince in Florence. When another Jew, Flavius, translated Abulafia’s Ve-­zot for the prince, the translator dropped a r eference to Elia into a pa ssage that contrasts Aristotelian philosophy with Kabbalah—­promoted by Abulafia as an anti-­ philosophy. Flavius remembered Elia not just as someone known to Pico but also as a competitor for patronage—­and as an Averroist whose antithetical views on the soul and Intellect nonetheless overlapped with Abulafia’s own ideas about the ladder and impregnation.17 Abulafia’s letter on t­ hese secrets claims that its author learned them by climbing the ladder to reach the goal that Elia called “attaining (adeptio) the Agent Intellect.” Not all Kabbalists r­ ose so high, Abulafia charged, certainly not the theosophists who ­were also theurgists, who studied the Sefirot in hopes of changing their deployment in divine space and altering the sexuality of divinity along with their own. This audacious theosophy—­a blueprint for meddling with the Godhead in order to improve it—­was eventually compiled in the Zohar and then restated by Menahem Recanati. The futility of this approach, according to Abulafia, was trying to get at God’s essence through his attributes. Treating vari­ous features of divinity as distinct, theosophists sinned by trying to divide Unity. They investigated “each Numeration of the ten Numerations that lack essence. But the master who knows the Names intends a dif­fer­ent intention, much loftier. . . . ​The depth of this way—­namely, the way of holy Names—­goes so deep that among all the depths of ­human thought none is deeper or loftier. In fact, this way alone ­causes ­human thought to be conjoined with divine thought by participation or association.”18 By p rayerful meditation on divine names and the letters in them, Abulafia’s “way of holy Names”—in contrast to sefirotic Kabbalah—­aimed to unify, to divinize the ­human soul by conjoining it with the Agent Intellect and cleaving to the divine. The Kabbalah rejected by Abulafia went wrong by “cutting off the plants”—­the plants and trees in Eden, which are also the Sefirot. Two ­theses that Pico attributes to “Hebrew Kabbalist sages” say that T1K4 ​Adam’s sin was to cut the Kingdom off from other Plants. T1K5 ​God created the world with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, in which the first man sinned.

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The Zohar and other books of Kabbalah associate the Tree of Life in Eden with S6 and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil with S10, the Kingdom or Shekinah; they link S6 with S10 and also with e­ very other plant in the garden—­a ll the Sefirot. Adam sinned by separating the trees, by cutting the Tree of Knowledge off from other trees and thus isolating S10 from the higher Sefirot. Beyond time and the heavens, the exiled S10—­the Shekinah—­mirrors Israel’s historical scattering on earth. Despite this catastrophe, all the plants must recover and thrive so that the “stock w ­ ill not be separated from its root.” But S10 is the Last Plant, and its fertility ­will dry up if sodomy thwarts procreation. In another of Pico’s ­theses, T1K36 ​Sodom sinned by severing the Last Plant.

This primal sin of which Abulafia accused his rivals was their rash attempt to divide the hypercosmic creation from the Creator even though God made every­thing a living, breeding ­whole: “be fruitful and multiply.”19 The letter by Abulafia that Flavius translated for Pico explained why this messianic visionary disagreed with other Kabbalists. Pico had this disagreement in mind when he described Kabbalah as divided into the Numerations (Sefirot) of Zoharic theosophy and the Names (Shemot) of Abulafia’s mystical ecstasies: T2K1 ​What­ever the rest of the Kabbalists may say, the first distinction that I w ould make divides knowledge of Kabbalah into knowledge of Sefirot and Shemot, similar to theoretical and practical knowledge.

Pico’s thesis paraphrases Abulafia’s division of Kabbalah into “two parts, which are knowledge of the Name of God . . . ​t hrough the way of the ten Numerations . . . ​a nd knowledge of the ­g reat Name through the path of twenty-­t wo letters.” When theosophists studied the Numerations or Sefirot to make distinctions between them and tell their stories, the goal was to end the Shekinah’s exile by conforming their prayers, rituals and lives to God’s vari­ous attributes—­a nd vice-­versa. But Abulafia thought that this mythmaking ­v iolated the divine unity. Mystical ­u nion with the Agent Intellect was the very dif­fer­ent aim of his Kabbalah of Names. Pico derived his final 72 t­ heses, a Kabbalah of his own, from Abulafia and other “Hebrew sages.” The previous 47 t­ heses on Kabbalah, which he did not claim for himself, came mainly from the commentary on the Pen-



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tateuch by Recanati, who revered the Zohar but not all of its mythologizing. On one side of the division into Numerations and Names was Abulafia’s “way of holy Names.” On the other side w ­ ere Recanati, the Zohar and their 20 speculations on the Sefirot.

3. ​Counting on Flavius By Christianizing what Abulafia himself had divided when he denounced the theosophists, Pico had hopes for concord in Kabbalah and wanted to reunify it. His Trinitarian and Christological doctrines ­were not Abulafia’s or any other Kabbalist’s, but his mysticism owed a g­ reat deal to Abulafia. In the Oration and Conclusions, however, Abulafia is unnamed, even though his ideas control the division of Kabbalah that introduces the 72 culminating ­theses of the 900. What about the speech that introduces the Conclusions? Of all Pico’s ­theses, more discuss Kabbalah than any other topic: Should we also look for Kabbalah in parts of a speech where it is not on the surface? Pico first mentioned Kabbalah in the m ­ iddle of the Oration and waited ­until the end to say what he meant by it. As he told the story, Kabbalah began when “Esdras arranged for sages . . . ​to contribute what they remembered about mysteries of the Law, and scribes w ­ ere brought in to compile the contributions in seventy volumes—­roughly the number of sages in the Sanhedrin.” The number 70—­not 72—­matches a detail in the apocryphal 4 Esdras: 70 newer books ­were kept secret when 24 older works of an original 94 ­were made public. The number 70 can also be found in or derived from a number of biblical texts. What was Pico’s point?21 ­Those whom the gods w ­ ill destroy, they first drive mad with numerology: this maxim is often the best advice, b ­ ecause ­simple arithmetic and a ­little ingenuity can produce any number you like. But numerological method is explicit in Pico’s Kabbalah. According to T2K62, “the novenary number of the beatitudes . . . ​in the Gospel . . . ​fits wonderfully with the novenary of nine Numerations that come beneath the first.” T2K68 shows “what the denary is in formal arithmetic and recognizes the nature of the first s­ pherical number.” T2K65 applies the “method of number” to prove that the Shema—­for Jews the most sacred prayer of all—­ends with the name of Jesus. No need for detailed calculations to see that numerology is Pico’s procedure in t­ hese conclusions.22

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Elsewhere the numerology is less obvious and the arithmetic more intricate, as in a thesis about Jesus and Satan: T1K19 ​The letters of a name of the evil demon who is the Prince of This World and of a Name of God, the Triagrammaton, are the same, and one who knows how to arrange their transposition ­w ill derive the one from the other.

To find a name shared by God and the Devil, Pico went to books of Kabbalah that no Christian had ever read—­books sometimes altered by Flavius to mislead the prince and excite him. One doctored passage put Pico on the trail of the letters in the name Satan (‫ )ׂשטן‬and their numerical values: ‫ ן‬+ ‫ ט‬+ ‫ = ׂש‬7 + 9 + 3 = 19. The technique that he called “transposition” assigns only unit values—­excluding the usual tens and hundreds—to all twenty-­two Hebrew letters: this converts the normal value of ‫ׂשטן‬, which is 379, to 19, the same number that comes from treating Yesu (‫)יׁשו‬, normally 316, in the same way. Pico thought that Yesu was the name of Jesus in Hebrew, which he confirmed obliquely in a thesis about the “method of number.” T2K65 ​It is more correct that amen should say Tiferet and Kingdom, as the method of number shows, than that it should say Kingdom only, as some suppose.

S10 is the Kingdom or Shekinah; S6 is Beauty or Tiferet, whose letters also sum to 19 when properly ‘transposed’; and S6 belongs to Jesus in Pico’s Trinitarian Kabbalah. He planned to tell his audience in Rome about this “divine arithmetic” and “divine science,” which—­even if his hearers had a printed text—­would have mystified them all.23 The assembled cardinals would have had no way to know that thesis T1K19, which discusses two names equivalent to 19, is also thesis 19 in its set. Pico planned to distribute the printed Conclusions, but the t­ heses ­were not numbered. No one could have guessed that the number of all the ­theses, 900, was another construct of Kabbalist numerology. The prelates in Rome believed that the Holy Spirit came to comfort the faithful ­after Christ ascended, but they had never heard the Paraclete described by the Jewish mystery that Pico named yet did not reveal. T2K41 ​In Kabbalah one can know through the mystery of the closed mem why Christ sent a Paraclete ­after him.



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Nothing would have led them from this cryptic mem (‫ )ם‬to a dif­fer­ent thesis on Plato (Pla): T2Pla1 ​By triadic numbers that Plato, in the Timaeus, puts in a triangle signifying the soul, we are advised how far to go, in numbering forms, by the nature of what the first forming form is. But by dyadic numbers posited in the same place, we are advised, from the nature of what a ­middle term is in general, about how far to coordinate m ­ iddle terms with two posited extremes.

The topic of this thesis is a t win series of 2s and 3s that harmonize the world soul in the Timaeus. The “first forming form” is 1, the Unity that heads the two series, which are powers of 2 and powers of 3: the first four powers of 2 are 1, 2, 4, and 8; 1, 3, 9, and 27 are the first four powers of 3. Arranged as sides of a triangle (or a Greek lambda), they look like this: 1 2     3 4         8           

9 27

The left side adds up to 15, the number of Yah (‫)יה‬, a name of God; the right side sums to 40, one value of the letter mem. This letter is one of five in the Hebrew alphabet that has two forms: initial or medial—in this case ‫—מ‬to start a word or go inside it; and a final form—in this case ‫—ם‬to end a word. Both forms of mem are the numeral 40, but the final mem can also be 600. T2Pla1, saying nothing openly about e­ ither mem, describes the psychic 2s and 3s that descend from Unity, and 40—­the sum of the branch on the right—is a mem. The other mem, the closed mem, is 600; 600 is the product of 40 times 15; and T2Pla1 is number 600 of Pico’s 900 t­ heses.24 When he had nearly finished his ­t heses, the prince wrote to Girolamo Benivieni and said “that they had grown to 900 and w ­ ere moving t­ oward 1,000 except that I called a halt, content to take my stand at the former number, a mystical number, naturally.” But why this mystical number, with so many to choose from? He settled on 900 as a “symbol of the soul rushing back into itself when agitated by the frenzy of the Muses,” he told his friend, who knew that the Muses w ­ ere nine and, like any good Christian, that the soul did best apart from the flesh. All this would make sense,

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Pico assured Benivieni, “if my theory of numbers is correct.” The theory was a secret of Kabbalah, however, and even if this secret could be revealed and explained, a short letter was not the right place to try.25 At this time, when Pico was still putting his t­ heses together, he also wrote his Commento on a love poem—in nine stanzas—by Benivieni. The commentary identifies seven Muses as souls of planetary spheres, an eighth with the soul of the starry sphere and Calliope, the ninth, as “the noblest and first soul among them all, the world’s universal soul.” None of this would have surprised a Quattrocento poet. But in the very last lines of the Commento, the poet’s friend compared him to “ancient theologians who thought it rash to make divine ­matters and secret mysteries public”—­a lso to Jews who treated Kabbalah as “suitable for sharing only with a few.” Pico summarized his task as showing how Benivieni, like the Kabbalists, hid his thoughts about love ­under “secret veils and poetic disguises.” Accordingly, the prince made Kabbalah—in fleeting allusions—­part of his evidence about the soul as symbolized by nine Muses.26 Pico and Benivieni ­were close. Most of what they talked about is lost to us—­surely more than the rec­ords show. And yet Kabbalist numerology, ­because of its outlandish complexity, might have strained even the friendliest conversations. Pico read Benivieni’s Canzona as if the Kabbalah that he applied to it was “the strongest basis for our faith.” Would this devout poet accept—­were his friend to tell him so—­that secret Hebrew wisdom could illuminate the decisive moment in the annals of the h ­ uman soul, when the spirit of the crucified Jesus left its body to save all humanity?27 The numeral 900, about which Pico wrote to Benivieni, is the letter tsade in final form (‫ ;)ץ‬the other tsade (‫ )צ‬is 90. A rabbinic text, known to the Zohar’s authors, distinguishes the two as ‘straight’ and ‘bent.’ Since the straight tsade is the “true branch” of David’s royal line, 900 was just the right “mystical number” to tie all Pico’s t­ heses together: they culminate in 72 conclusions that use Kabbalah along with rabbinical and gentile wisdom to prove that Jesus was the crucified Messiah—­the sacrificed Redeemer foreshadowed by Isaac’s submission to Abraham.28 “Who is this (zeh) who comes from Edom? ” Pico’s answer to Isaiah’s question turned on the word zeh or ‘this,’ another ordinary pronoun like zot, but with Christological meaning: zeh is the masculine ‘this,’ zot is feminine. Thesis T2K22 praises Christ as the true Israel’s champion against Edom, ­after the previous thesis had confirmed Isaiah’s prophecy that zeh would be the Savior.



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T2K21 ​One who has joined a statement of the Kabbalists, saying that the Numeration called Just and the Redeemer is also called zeh, with a statement by Talmudists, saying that Isaac went like zeh carry­ing his cross, ­will see that what was prefigured in Isaac was fulfilled in Christ.

Kabbalists assigned zeh to S9, also called the Foundation, the Just One and the Redeemer. In the shape of the word’s first letter, zayin (‫)ז‬, the rabbis saw Isaac shouldering the wood for his own sacrifice—­“ like one who carries his cross on his shoulder” or, in Pico’s eyes, like Christ on his way to Calvary. The prince did not realize that Flavius, his translator, had used propaganda by a medieval convert—­the notorious Dagger of Faith by Ramón Martí—to salt the texts ­behind this thesis. Tricked again by Flavius and dazzled by the shapes of sacred letters, he had reason (if not good reasons) to revere the cruciform tsade along with the redemptive zeh.29

‫ז    ץ‬ The person who fooled Pico was truly remarkable. Born in Sicily around 1450, he converted about fifteen years ­later and took his first gentile name, Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada, from his godfather. Then he became a priest and worked as a teacher and translator of Hebrew and Arabic in Palermo, before moving to Rome around 1477 to join the famiglia of Cardinal Giovanni Cibò—­soon to be Innocent VIII. The previous pope, Sixtus  IV, supported experts on language as a m ­ atter of policy, and Flavius impressed him. Sixtus invited him to preach before the Curia on Good Friday of 1481, but within two years charges of bad be­hav­ior forced him to leave the holy city. By 1484 he had also left the peninsula, using the alias ‘Mithridates’ to advertise his skills in language while peddling fake texts. He returned to Italy by 1485, but how soon he met Pico is unknown: Ficino heard him debate Elia del Medigo at the prince’s h ­ ouse in Florence during this period. By 1486 Flavius was certainly working for Pico—­and perhaps ­earlier. And he may already have made translations useful to the prince: the Oration credits Sixtus with subsidizing Latin versions of three books of Kabbalah.30 Flavius and Pico worked very fast and mostly apart: the servant was so unruly and his master so arrogant that distance was a blessing for both. Separation caused Flavius to communicate with the prince through glosses in his translations—­about 600 of them survive in the manuscripts. ­These asides are melodrama in zany Latin: the translator blasts his papal masters

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in Rome, revels in his own anx­i­eties and torments his current employer. He returns again and again, mercilessly, to the spring of 1486 and the failed abduction of Margherita. In a biblical scene, where “Esau came in from the field,” he found a pretext for mocking Pico. As the rabbis understood this passage, the field was where Esau “­violated a betrothed maiden,” and Flavius described it as a “place of illicit sex and depravity (near Lucignano where Pico was caught with Margherita), . . . ​the same land where wounded and slaughtered men fell (like Pico’s cook and many of his followers).” Flavius badgered and manipulated the prince to make himself indispensable: “You c­ an’t find anyone to give you an excellent Latin translation of this material, which is scarcely intelligible in Hebrew: for what you do understand, you have Mithridates to thank.” While harrying his patron, he also ridiculed him for personal gifts that o ­ thers praised: riches and good looks. “Pico is handsome,” and Flavius compared him to King David with his concubines: “­Women run ­a fter him to have sex—­especially Margherita.” Flavius warned that “anyone who fornicates with a ­woman is a c razy man,” however, and harassed Pico to procure a boy for him. When the boy failed to appear, the translator threatened not to teach his wealthy student Aramaic, “the Chaldean language (that he w ­ ill never know u ­ nless a pretty boy arrives).” One favorite from Faenza was named Lancilotto. Puns on his name (lancea, ‘lance’) ­were irresistible. The results ­were sordid jokes in weird juxtaposition with sacred theosophy. While translating a te xt on mystical ascent, Flavius tracked the soul’s climb through the Sefirot, starting at S10 and S9, the Kingdom and Foundation (Fundamentum): “­After a man has entered the Fundament (Lancilotto of Faenza’s bottom), t­ here is nothing to impede him.”31 Pico ­violated bound­aries in the Oration and defied convention, but he was temperance itself compared to his translator. With Flavius setting the standard, the prince’s wildest novelties w ­ ere modest—at least on the surface. And ­because the most provocative parts of the Oration ­were never printed in his lifetime, he never had to apologize for them—as he did for the Conclusions. He also had no reason to consider the speech’s placement on the page or how its parts might look to a r eader. Nonetheless, it is a m onument of oratory—­even though it fails to communicate—­with many marks of structure and articulation. Halfway through, for example, the orator refers to reasons that “have not just excited me to study philosophy but have forced me to it.” ­These are reasons that he has just given: the anaphora divides one



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section of the speech from another. ­There are many such signals—­like directions to “consult” with ancient sages in a sequence indicated by repetitions of ‘consult.’32 Organ­ization is vis­i­ble, but any pattern imposed on the speech w ­ ill be just that—an imposition: Pico never laid out a blueprint or copied someone ­else’s. The following outline, where the numbering is mine, may or may not show how he was thinking: I II III

IV V VI VII

(1–10) (11–15) (16–35) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (36–55) (56–62) (63–68) (69–72)

Adam is ­free to change. Adam’s ­children must change into angels. Ancient sages teach them how to change: Paul (16); Jacob (17–19); Job (20–25); Moses (26); Ancient Theologians (27–30); Pythagoras (31–32); Zoroaster (33–35). Pico defines and defends his philosophical ambitions. As part of philosophy, he proposes a new theory of magic. He also gives a brief history of Kabbalah. He asks for thanks and closes.

Maybe the speech hides a structure of nested sevens like this one, or maybe not: t­ here is surely some such order in it. Only a close and aggressive reading w ­ ill uncover the secrets of Kabbalah concealed t­ here, where the author wanted them hidden, along with gentile mysteries. For nearly five centuries—­until Wirszubski’s book was published and Bausi used his findings to edit the speech—­the prince had his way. Many readers of other texts by him or about him simply ignored the Oration. ­Others found its puzzles too hard to solve and ascribed messages to it that ­were implausible, incompatible or both. Pico’s speech is deliberately mysterious and its method is arcane. One of his techniques was to hide or half-­hide his sources. To find his message, I have tried to uncover some of them, but the message itself—­more than its sources—is my topic in this chapter and the next two, where I examine the speech, dividing it into the seven large pieces and seventy-­two smaller parts shown in my outline. Cav ea t le c t or: my exposition is keyed to the

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translation in Appendix A, whose numbering follows my outline. I have supplied a t ranslation so that Pico’s speech could be read along with my exposition, which ­will be informative only if the two are read together, part by part. Each section of exposition begins with a summary; numbers in the summaries refer to my outline and translation.

4. ​ Oration I, 1–10 ­ fter announcing that man is astonishing (1), Pico asks why (2) and A answers that he knows why (3): b ­ ecause God made h ­ umans last and ran out of ingredients (4–5). To explain the h ­ uman creature’s unique situation, the Creator made a speech, directing Adam to shape himself (6)—­a commandment of ­great liberality (7). Other amazing shape-­shifters have shown ­humans the way (8), which is not to be cloaked in h ­ uman flesh (9)—­least of all for a creature with no single image or nature (10). Words from a f amous text—­the Hermetic Asclepius—­announce that “man is a ­great miracle.” The phrase was familiar, long since detached from its context. In the original Latin discourse, man is a miracle for a reason—­ “­because of this”—­and this is mankind’s m ­ iddle status, his central place in a cosmos where h ­ umans are in touch with gods and demons above as well as beasts, plants, and stones below. Some ­humans are “contented,” happy to be where and what they are. But the enlightened person “despises the part of him that is ­human nature”: ­these words that Pico omits match the relentless asceticism in his speech. But the Asclepius does not support man’s having “no fixed seat,” as Pico ­will shortly claim, though he too locates the unfixed h ­ uman “at the center of the world,” whence he can rise or fall—­though falling is not an issue in the Asclepius. Is Pico serious? Is he dazzling us with art? Are a few words from the Asclepius just a flourish of oratory? Should we forget the rhe­toric or look closer and try to resolve contradictions? He names two sources—­citing “Abdala, a Saracen,” to confirm the Hermetic saying. Abdala has not been identified: the name is common for Arabs and Muslims—­like ‘John’ in En­glish. This much is clear: sages of ancient Egypt and the Orient called man a g­ reat won­der, but Pico wanted to test the old arguments.33 The orator needed to persuade a h ­ uman audience, and his oratory flattered a ­human won­der. Yet Pico wanted better reasons to confirm the h ­ uman miracle than ­those he had heard. He called the new creature featureless—­“a work with no distinct image.” Yet in God’s own words—­not ­those in­ven­ted



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by Pico—­Adam’s form is absolutely distinctive, a divine likeness that cannot be improved b ­ ecause it was God himself who “created man in his image.” Th ­ ere could be nothing nondescript about this godlike ­human. Since every­one knew the biblical evidence, why would Pico fictionalize God’s words and alter the divine plan?34 The prince thought that he had uncovered a deeper message, and soon he would refer, in passing, to a “more secret theology” known to Jews. But ­until the last part of the speech he withheld a fuller account of ­these mysteries and God’s command to keep them secret. Only the perfect—­sages like Maimonides and Kabbalists like Abulafia—­were permitted to interpret them. God’s address to Adam is such an interpretation by Pico, revealing or half-­revealing the private meaning of the public story told in Genesis. Rabbinical writings and books of Kabbalah gave him pre­ce­dent for inventing words that, according to the “­simple story” of the Bible, God never spoke. But the Almighty speaks off the rec­ord in postbiblical texts to David, Daniel, Elijah, the Moon, Noah, Solomon, and even to abstract features of His own divinity and letters of the alphabet—­and also to Adam.35 Writing such a s cript for the Creator was bold, and Pico’s framing of God’s speech was opaque—­undetectable by his audience b ­ ecause Kabbalah was his guide. Having heard or seen this much of the prince’s address, no Quattrocento Christian would have had any reason to think about Kabbalah. Even when Pico describes Kabbalah l­ater, he deals mainly with origins, not basic princi­ples. He says nothing about the Sefirot, for example. But when he brings God on stage to open his own speech, the Sefirot attend the Creator in the person of Wisdom, who is S2. Before making Adam, according to Pico, God “had already applied laws of arcane Wisdom” in previous phases of creation. A womanly Wisdom speaks in Proverbs, whose lessons start with “words of sages and their riddles.” Wise advice can also be plain, however. “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise”: nothing mysterious ­there. Then why did Pico call Wisdom ‘arcane’ or ‘mystical’? He knew a secret about her—­that she is S2, whose name is Wisdom. She is the second Sefirah through whom God first descends from S1 to move ­toward lower levels of creation. Her mystic laws shape the creative forces that flow from the hidden God to vis­i­ble creatures. In the lower reaches of creation, her laws become laws of Nature that regulate natu­ral magic, which Pico ­will also explain ­later in the speech, when he theorizes about magic. And then, talking about mysteries of Kabbalah, he ­will call them

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“arcana of supreme divinity concealed beneath the bark of the Law.” He says this while declaring that concealment—by God’s command—is his method.36 ­After God has addressed Adam in Pico’s veiled words, the speech paraphrases a pa ssage from the Protrepticus by Iamblichus. This ancient Platonist—­Ficino translated his Mysteries of Egypt ­after Pico died—is the prince’s main witness for Pythagorean wisdom, but he goes unnamed u ­ ntil ­later. His Protrepticus is an exhortation to philosophy—­well suited to a speech about that subject. “If sense and mind are taken from man,” says Iamblichus, “he becomes like a plant; then, if only mind is taken, he turns bestial; but if the unreasoning part is taken away and he remains in mind, he becomes like God. As much as pos­si­ble, then, he must purge the passions of unreasoning, using pure energies of mind to look ­toward himself and to God.” ­Later in the speech, when the ascent from plants and animals to humanity and divinity approaches the realm of absolute transcendence, Pico ­will need a C hristian guide. Up to this point, however, heathen wisdom has been helpful. Iamblichus and other pagan sages found their path in twelve of Plato’s dialogues, keyed to “virtues ordered at five levels: natu­ral, moral, po­liti­cal, cathartic, visionary.” They learned the virtues in a curriculum of two cycles: first they studied (1) moral philosophy, (2) dialectic, (3) natu­ral philosophy, and (4) theology from ten of the twelve dialogues; then they devoted the second cycle entirely to the Timaeus for natu­ral philosophy and the Parmenides for divinity. This curriculum, as Iamblichus described it, went “from low to high, as by a b ridge or a l adder,” with steps or rungs counted in dif­fer­ent ways. Accordingly, Pico divided his program into a lower level, which is discursive, and a higher level, which is experiential and intuitive. The lower level moves in threes, fours, and fives, though four is the dominant rhythm, starting with moral philosophy for purification (1) and ascending through dialectic for clarification (2) and natu­ral philosophy for information (3) ­toward theology for meditation (4). At higher levels, magic (5) and Kabbalah (6) lead to unification with God or divinization (7)—­“absolutely apart in the ­Father’s darkness,” in imagery taken from an ancient master of Christian mysticism, the monk known as Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius—­a Platonist in the way of Proclus and likewise drunk on metaphysics—­warned the faithful against “imagining that nothing exists supersubstantially, beyond par­tic­u­lar entities.” Initiates into the Areop-



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agite’s mysteries w ­ ere instructed to “leave all this b ­ ehind, . . . ​make a complete break from themselves and every­thing ­else, and ascend to the supersubstantial light beaming from God’s shadow . . . ​, where ­there is neither oneself nor anyone ­else.” Except for God, absolutely nobody, no one at all, remains ­after the ascent: e­ very h ­ uman self has dissolved in the depths of the Godhead, whose unfathomable unity drowns the identities of pilgrims who have completed the journey. Mystical ­union of this annihilating type suited the ‘perfect being theology’ of Christian dogma, which insisted on a G od with absolutely e­ very perfection: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and all the rest. Pagans, by contrast, could revere a fallible hero like Hercules or an imperfect autocrat like Augustus as only somewhat divine—­not eternally a god, for example, nor entirely so. But such options of on-­and-­off divinity or godhood by the clock w ­ ere foreclosed by Chris­tian­ity. If u ­ nion with divinity was the goal—­not just nearness to God in heaven or delight in seeing him—­there was no place at all, at the end of it, for an ordinary ­human’s humanity. Deification so conceived, the goal promoted by Pico’s speech, eliminates humanity—­a long with any merely ­human trait like dignity, though dignity was not the prince’s concern. (Nor did the mystery of Christ’s incarnation interest him much.) His proj­ect in the Oration, often misunderstood as a p roto-­romantic individualism that aggrandizes the ­human self, actually liquidates it.37 His speech advocates study before action, theory before practice, reflection before experience. And yet the ­whole program is a regimen, not just instruction for students but also transformation for initiates. Moral improvement is the first course in a school of virtue. At this stage and the next three, natu­ral virtues of moderation, justice, courage, and wisdom are accessible to all ­humans, ­until at higher levels only Christians can count on super­natural virtues of faith, hope, and love. The speech implies—­but does not state—­that t­ hese seven levels of virtue give order to Pico’s proj­ect, where par­tic­u­lar virtues are less prominent than broader goals of a lower pedagogy and a higher practice: ethical development, pro­gress through a course of study and visionary experience. The first steps of Pico’s regimen and curriculum are cathartic: cleansing the soul morally with ethics (1) and clarifying the mind with logic (2) before supplying the intellect with scientific knowledge (3) as a ba sis for theological contemplation (4). The curriculum is the theoretical and lower part of a program whose higher part is practical and experiential: ­after the

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phi­los­o­pher has theorized about nature, the magus applies the theory to work natu­ral magic (5); ­after the theologian has theorized about God, the Kabbalist ascends ­toward the Godhead (6) and a terminal ecstasy of unification (7). In the first half of the speech, Pico pre­sents his curriculum again and again: the repetition is emphatic, making the fourfold pattern unmistakable. Near the start, however, just a­ fter God has spoken to Adam, he allows only a g lance at this armature of the Oration in an unattributed paraphrase of Iamblichus. This is his method: showing, by covert example, that the greatest truths are never told directly or made public. A curriculum in several stages—­usually four but sometimes three or five—­rises to theology: this is the last and highest discursive step, as distinct from practice, experience, and intuition, that precedes magic, Kabbalah, and mystical ­union. One dimension of mystical praxis is psychological: ‘withdrawing’ from the body into the mind. But the initiate ­will eventually eliminate psy­chol­ogy altogether by drowning his mind in divinity. The Areopagite calls this evacuation of experience “the darkness of unknowing” in his classical statement of Christian mysticism, which is also an exegesis of the place in Exodus where “Moses approached the darkness in which God was.” The authors of the Zohar saw the darkness as a help to Moses, a garment shielding him on Sinai from God’s eff ulgence.38 As mystical experience or epistemic restraint or shelter from God’s splendor, darkness is a pious comfort. What about Pico’s next topic: mankind’s “shapeshifting and self-­changing nature” as signified by an animal, a mythical figure, and a K abbalist angel—­Metatron, Proteus, and the chameleon?39 The Vulgate Bible lists the chameleon (Latin cameleon, Hebrew tin­ shemet, Aramaic zaqita) with unclean reptiles that may not be touched and that defile other ­things by contact. Talmud scholars concluded that keeping a breeding pair alive in the ark was hard for Noah ­until he saw that chameleons would eat worms, also unclean, falling from a pomegranate—­ one l­egal point being that seemingly kosher food may hide impurity u ­ nder the surface. The Zohar tells a story about a two-­headed demon who called himself ‘Chameleon.’40 Aristotle describes the chameleon as a scaly, sluggish reptile with a face like a baboon: it changes color by puffing itself up with air. In Pliny’s encyclopedia from ancient Rome, the same ugly lizard combines features of fish, pigs, vipers, tortoises, and crocodiles, though its horrific appearance



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Figure 18. ​“Chameleon,” Alciato, Emblems, 1534.

is a mask for harmlessness. Timidity makes the chameleon change colors, and magical substances extracted from it are mostly fakes. This animal that “takes sustenance only from the air” might be a totem for ascetics. But chameleons are flatterers, according to Plutarch, who calls Alcibiades a chameleon b ­ ecause versatility helped this turncoat survive. In some ways all h ­ umans are chameleons, says Aristotle: au­then­tic happiness can be counted on, but fortune is fickle, and ­people adapt to circumstances like lizards changing color. This dismal dossier from the classics was the background for Andrea Alciato’s emblem, where the chameleon was a t oady and unchaste (Figure 18).41 Pliny’s account of the chameleon was nonsense, according to the literary miscellany of Aulus Gellius—­just another case of “seduction by marvels.” When Erasmus reviewed the ancient texts, however, he reported Pliny’s comments with a straight face. He also noted Aristotle’s “use of the word ‘chameleon’ to express the vice of inconstancy”—­just before making the same point about Proteus in Plato’s Ion. Erasmus, who edited works by Gregory Nazianzen, may also have known that this F ­ ather of the Church linked the chameleon with Proteus as a vicious trickster. Alciato’s emblem of Proteus was a fishy old man, not much prettier than the lizard. At one moment he looks h ­ uman, at another like an animal, leaving observers to see him in “any shape you like.” He is elusive and indeterminate. But in the Orphic Hymns that Pico studied, he “changes blessed ­matter into many forms”—­a divine power and a mark of honor. Which Proteus did Pico have in mind? Since he called m ­ atter “worthless,” like the “dirt of the ground,” a P roteus who treated m ­ atter as sacred—as in the

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Orphic Hymns—­would not have been suitable. And Pico tells us that it was the “Athenian Asclepius,” not Orpheus, who made Proteus stand for man “in the mysteries.” Was Socrates—­a physician of the soul—­this Asclepius from Athens? His ­dying words invoked the god. The Hermetic Asclepius was Egyptian, however, not Athenian, and took no special notice of Proteus—­unlike Socrates. One day Socrates met Ion returning from a festival of Asclepius a­ fter winning first prize for performing Homer’s epics. He called Ion a de ceiver, “twisting and turning like Proteus to become all manner of p ­ eople at once.” Socrates also criticized Homer himself for treating gods as mutable, as if they would bother to disguise themselves for mortals. Proclus, a poetic phi­ los­o­pher and theologian, extended this criticism to Homer’s stories about Proteus and Thetis—­though in a text that can be placed in Italy only ­after 1492. Homer’s tale was r­ eally about divine epiphanies in mystic initiation, according to Proclus, where “the gods show themselves often changing shape”—an observation supported by the Chaldean Oracles. Ficino, while linking Proteus with the chameleon and labile imagination, nonetheless located him in the order of intelligences. But the changing Proteus vis­i­ble to ­humans was not genuinely divine, according to Proclus: when the crusty Old Man of the Sea was truly a god, he was immutable u ­ nder his scales. Beneath the stink, even the slippery seals that he herded w ­ ere immortal. The apparent instabilities reported by mortals w ­ ere just illusions.42 For Proteus and the chameleon, the biblical and classical rec­ords ­were inglorious. And much of this was familiar to Pico when he asked, “Who would not be astonished at this chameleon.” Astonishment of what kind: admiration or alarm? A ­human turned into a plant or an animal is certainly surprising, though not in a g ood way. Pico knew about transmigrated souls from Empedocles, Plato, and Pythagoras: as souls move from body to body, “they share not only the wild and bestial nature but vari­ous other forms, as when Empedocles writes, ‘long ago I lived as a boy and a stout tree, / as a bird, a sea-­dweller and then a girl full of milk.’ ” ­These ­were not desirable changes, in Pico’s eyes, no more alluring than Sabbath-­ breakers turned into apes, or infidels becoming sheep, according to the Koran that he also cites on metempsychosis. The only glorious change mentioned in this part of the speech is Enoch becoming Metatron, the highest of all angels, stationed ­behind the throne of the Almighty.43 The Oration has said nothing yet about Kabbalah when the orator announces that “with their more secret theology, Hebrews too sometimes



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transform the blessed Enoch into an angel of divinity, whom they call ‫­—”מטטרון‬Metatron. Enoch in the line of Cain was an ancestor of Methusaleh and Noah. Only the Apocrypha tell his full story. The Bible just says that he “walked with God; then he was no more, for God took him”—­instant elevation to angelic rank, according to some sages. A T argum explains that “Hanok served in the truth before the Lord; and, behold, he was not with the sojourners of the earth; for he was withdrawn, and he ascended to the firmament by the Word before the Lord, and his name was called Metatron.” Pico’s thesis T2K10 identifies the figure that “Kabbalists call ‫ מטטרון‬as beyond doubt what Orpheus names Pallas, Zoroaster the ­Father’s Mind, Mercury God’s Son, Pythagoras Wisdom, Parmenides the Intelligible Sphere.” Metatron was also a Jewish name for the Agent Intellect of Muslim mysticism, whose goal was conjunction with this lowest level of divinity. In a text translated for Pico, Abulafia wrote that “what takes our intellect from potency to act is an Intellect separated from all ­matter and called by many dif­fer­ent names. . . . ​He is the Prince of the World and Mattatron, Prince of the F ­ aces, . . . ​and the wise . . . ​call him Agent Intellect . . . ​, and he has many other names besides. . . . ​Our sages often call him . . . ​Henoch, and they say that Henoch is Mattatron.” A t hesis by Pico on Themistius confirms that the “Agent Intellect . . . ​is what Metatron is in Kabbalah.” But the Oration, supplying none of this context, introduces the angel and a “more secret theology” with hints about Kabbalah entirely beyond the grasp of Christians.44 This unknown (to Christians) angel stands near the top of the climb from plant to animal to ­human to divinity that Pico retraced through Homer’s story of Calypso—­a minor divinity whose allure was enough to keep Odysseus away from home for an additional seven years. This seducer was not Circe, however, who turned the hero’s crew into pigs. And yet anyone “enslaved by the senses”—­according to Pico’s comment on Calypso—­ “is no h ­ uman but a b east.” Plotinus had also assimilated Calypso with Circe when he urged initiates to begin with moral discipline, . . . ​to take no part in the pleasures of the body, . . . ​ become like God . . . ​and ascend again ­towards the Good . . . ​t hrough purifications and laying aside garments previously worn . . . ​, as if in consecrated precincts, apart from the common ways. . . . ​He that has the strength, let him arise and withdraw into himself, . . . ​turning away forever from material beauty. . . . ​Let us flee then to the Fatherland. . . . ​

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Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso.

Phi­los­o­phers guided by reason ­will soar away from all earthly witchcraft ­toward the Fatherland, ascending above plants and animals. But they w ­ ill still stand lower than truly divine contemplators who, in Pico’s view, w ­ ere divinities merely “cloaked in h ­ uman flesh,” striving to remove their material coverings and become angels—­like Enoch becoming Metatron.45 Wrapping up his case for this dehumanizing miracle, Pico pointed to “sacred scripture, Mosaic and Christian,” where mankind is “all flesh or sometimes ­every creature, seeing that he is the one who transforms, forges and fashions himself with the look of all flesh.” Kol-­basar, ‘all flesh’—­like kol-­ha-­aretz, ‘all earth’ and kol-­nefesh, ‘every­thing alive’—is a c ommon biblical phrase, often pejorative. The “end of all flesh” in Genesis 6 is the Angel of Death, according to the Zohar, a spirit who “desires nothing but flesh constantly, so flesh is arrayed for him constantly, and he is called the end of all flesh. When he rules, he rules over body, not over soul. Soul ascends to her site, while flesh is given to this site. Similarly with an off ering: aspiration ascends to one site, flesh to another. A v irtuous h ­ uman being is an a­ ctual off ering of atonement, while another is not, for he is defective”—­like an animal unfit for sacrifice. The witness called by Pico to testify about all flesh is unidentified—­the Persian Evantes. An Aramaic phrase that fits the Latin attributed to him is a reconstruction from the Ethiopic script (prob­ably supplied to Pico by Flavius) used at this point in a pa rtial—­and unique—­manuscript of the Oration (see Figure 20 in Chapter 13). The exotic words say that “man is a living ­thing whose nature is variable, manifold and inconstant.” For ­human nature embodied in the way of all flesh, the mutability that follows from the body’s inconstancy, mortality, and inevitable corruption is pernicious. As long as remedies of self-­fashioning are merely h ­ uman, the resulting images of man (not God) are “many, alien, and accidental” ­because ­human nature is erratic. Even if mutability w ­ ere a gain, contingency and 46 inconstancy would be losses. Nonetheless, since in their fallen nature ­humans must change, the speech urges sinners to turn themselves into angels: they must “aspire to the angelic life.” But this better life is only an aspiration for the wicked, not their due as Adam’s ­children. In order to be saved, the reprobate must climb a ladder of grace, which they cannot touch while dirtied by sin. Pico



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tells them to cleanse themselves for ascent with the regimen that he describes. L ­ ater, if they follow this path, they w ­ ill be initiated into Jewish mysteries that confirm articles of Christian faith—­including doctrines of “original sin and atonement through Christ.” ­Every heir of Adam and Eve must atone. Each person is polluted by sin and suff ers its ravages, both spiritual and physical: as Paul wrote, “the wages of sin is death.” Before the Fall, however, the first parents ­were immortal in both soul and body: even the puritan Augustine agreed; Origen and ­others went farther, teaching that the primordial ­human flesh was airy and luminous—­like (though not exactly like) Christ’s glorified body. But sinners who needed Pico’s advice—­living in the “waste and feculent parts of the world, . . . ​the body’s lonely wilderness”—­were no longer blessed in this way. The bodies shrouding their fallen souls had been defiled and disabled by sin. ­These fundamentals of Christian belief gave Pico a p rob­lem that his speech never resolves or even addresses: God promised freedom to Adam before his Fall into sin, but—­Jesus said—­“every­one who commits sin is a slave of sin.” How would God deliver freedom to such slaves in their fallen and embodied state? The theological question was and is difficult, eroding or perhaps destroying the bearing of God’s speech on the unglorified h ­ uman condition—­­after decay in the “way of all flesh.” The same question bolsters a common criticism of the Oration—­that it is just oratory and that the orator was satisfied to glide through it with stunning rhetorical showmanship but less concern for substance and coherence.47

5. ​ Oration II, 11–15 Having new proof for the old claim that man is the greatest won­der, Pico states his purpose: although the Bible describes h ­ umans as gods and animals, he aims to show that they must live like angels in heaven (11)—in par­tic­u­lar, like Cherubs (12–14). ­Humans in the flesh cannot achieve this on their own, however, so they must turn to the ancient ­Fathers for guidance (15). “A holy ambition” was the right attitude—in Pico’s judgment. His speech advised ­humans to “scorn ­things of earth, . . . ​despise ­those of heaven, and . . . ​fly up to the hypercosmic court nearest the most exalted divinity.” This path climbs beyond all lower worlds to the realm of angels, whose “rank (dignitas) and glory” ­humans are to emulate. ­Humans start

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this contest only a l­ ittle ­behind. Their position is privileged, but they should not forget that the dullest c­ attle are their cousins, herded by the same shepherd, who is Death, according to a Psalm that Pico mistook for a song by Asaph the prophet. And yet Asaph says in another Psalm that ­humans are “gods and all sons of the Most High.” Pico warned against turning the “­free choice that God granted us from a help to a harm.” That proud phrase, “sons of the Most High,” might have set t­ hings straight. But in the same Psalm an angry God judges angels for their own sins: praise for ­humans as godlike comes with a rebuke for their rivals. Pico also knew a K abbalist comment on this Psalm that deflated ­human arrogance by belittling man’s nearness to the angels in one breath and recalling his kinship with beasts in the next. God made man an animal and therefore weak: this was the point. Misunderstanding the honor that God grants them, ­people forget that they are “all flesh.” Even the comfort that Kabbalists took from the secret of the Tetragrammaton was qualified: the Name perfects the soul and makes her “mistress of the world,” but she still “diff ers not at all from the beasts.” The Zohar reveals more about Asaph: he protects ­people in times of danger by ‘gathering’ (’asaf) good angels to guard t­ hose who are righ­teous. Accordingly, when the powers of hell stir at dusk, the pious w ­ ill pray to summon angels who chant from eve­ning through the night ­until dawn: their leaders are Heman in the morning, Jeduthun at twilight, and at midnight Asaph is the “one official appointed over them.” They prepare for Metatron’s arrival and the Shekinah’s sacred intercourse with a higher Sefirah, a blessing extended to t­ hose who keep studying the Torah ­after midnight.48 Joining such angels in song was the “holy ambition” sanctified by Juno ­ ere regal by nature, as Pico learned from in the Oration. Her followers w Socrates, and the child that Juno’s disciples hoped to educate was a royal beloved. “When they have him, they emulate the god, leading the boy by persuasion and education to follow that god’s practice and ideal,” and then “mutual aff ection comes from the madness that love inspires.” To “emulate the god” was to outdo the heavenly hosts, when ­humans chose not to fulfill their humanity but to surpass and discard it. With this purpose set, Pico was determined to achieve it. “Let us see what . . . ​life they live,” he urged, meaning the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, “and if we live that life . . . ​, we s­ hall have made our destiny equal to theirs.” The saving competition came from three choirs of the “hypercosmic court,” led by the trio of Heman, Jeduthun, and Asaph. The Areopagite had explained that t­ hese



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three highest of the nine angelic ­orders oversaw purification, illumination, and perfection in the mystical ascent.49 The angels mentioned most often in scripture are Cherubim. They protect the Tree of Life in Eden from fallen h ­ umans. In Ezekiel’s vision they enthrone the divine Glory. Their images cover the Ark and other sacred furniture in the Bible’s liturgical passages. The Lord “mounted a Cherub and flew,” according to the Psalmist. They have wings, hands, feet, and bodies. Eyes cover them all over, and they have two f­ aces or four, t­ hose of an angel, an ea­g le, a lion, and a h ­ uman. Ezekiel heard their wings stirring the air, and they sang in the book of Revelation without being named: “A throne was set in heaven. . . . ​A nd round about the throne w ­ ere four beasts full of eyes before and b ­ ehind. . . . ​Each of them had six wings about him, and they ­were full of eyes within, and they rest not day and night, saying Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty, which was and is and is to come.” Their name appears only once in the New Testament, where the Letter to the Hebrews describes the Tabernacle of the first covenant: “Above the Ark w ­ ere Cherubim of Glory, overshadowing the place of expiation.” Scholars trace the Cherub’s form to the sphinx—­a winged lion with a ­human head—­a nd some derive its name from an Akkadian word.50 Although biblical evidence for Seraphim is scarcer, the etymology of the Hebrew word is clear: from the verb ‘to burn’ (saraf). The noun appears in one passage of Deuteronomy, one of Numbers, and three of Isaiah, and in all but one place it names a snake with fiery venom. Only in a vision of Isaiah are Seraphim angelic. The prophet sees “the Lord sitting on a throne, high and exalted. . . . ​Seraphim ­were stationed around him. One had six wings, and the other had six. Two wings covered their ­faces and two their feet, and with two wings they flew. They ­were calling to one another and saying Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts; the ­whole earth is full of his glory. As each called, it shook the lintels and posts.” Both Seraphim and Cherubim stand close to God—to protect, praise, purify, and expiate.51 No angels in the Hebrew Bible are called Thrones. But Paul lists “Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers” in a passage of Colossians. The prominence of God’s Throne in liturgy and apocalyptic, where other angels abound, motivated this expansion of the older angelology. ­Later the innovation would link Paul with Dionysius the Areopagite, who borrowed his name from a disciple of Paul and whose Celestial Hierarchy became the main Christian account of the subject. ­Others had listed nine

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ranks of angels, but Dionysius was the first to or­ga­nize them in three ­orders of three, with Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim at the top.52 Pico arranged this highest order of three in a hierarchy according to agency (active, contemplative, unitive), psy­chol­ogy (judgment, contemplation, love) and substance (mass, light, fire). ­Humans “bent on a life full of action who accept concern for lower ­things” could live a h oly life like Thrones, who are angels of firm judgment. But o ­ thers “detached from active ­matters” would rise higher to contemplation and “gleam with Cherubic light.” And t­ hose who reached the summit of love would burn with Seraphic fire and be consumed. Seraphs are nearest to the God who sits above the Thrones of judgment and hovers over the contemplating Cherubs, “for the Spirit of the Lord is borne upon the ­waters . . . ​above the heavens.” Pico was thinking about a P salm again: “­There sat thrones for judgment.” But the Areopagite connected them with nothing so practical as judging. Explaining that Serafim in Hebrew are angels that burn and that Kerubim are knowing or wise, he said nothing about a Hebrew word for ‘Thrones.’ He took the Greek name to signify “their complete detachment from any subjugation to the earthly and their otherworldly inclination ­toward the higher.” Gregory the ­Great, however, described them as channeling the Creator’s activity to creatures: “God took his seat upon them ­because they w ­ ere so full of divine grace, and he delivered his judgments through them.”53 The Areopagite’s nine ranks became canonical for Christians, though Jewish tradition often preferred ten groups. In a Kabbalist text known to Pico, the names ­were ­those that he used in the Conclusions, while changing the order: T1K2 ​­There are nine hierarchies of angels, whose names are Cherubim, Seraphim, Hasmalim, Haiot, Aralim, Tarsisim, Ophanim, Thephsarim, and Isim.

Another thesis added that T1K30 ​No angel with six wings ever changes.

The immutable angels ­were Seraphim and Cherubim, but Pico mentioned Cherubim first, ready for h ­ umans to emulate in a “Cherubic life,” whereas Seraphs blazed beyond reach and Thrones reached down ­toward “lower ­things” that changed: ­these ­were the Hasmalim that Pico listed third, and they ­were also Kis’oth or Thrones. Farther down came archangels, including



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Gabriel and Michael—­the only two angels in the Hebrew Bible with proper names. As God’s messengers to earthly creatures, they changed even more than Thrones so that mutable ­humans could see and hear them.54 Michael helps h ­ uman souls leave their bodies in ecstasy, sometimes without ­dying in the ordinary sense, although—if death results—it is a blessing. As Pico puts it in the first of his t­ heses on Kabbalah: T1K1 ​Just as a ­human being and lower priest sacrifices souls of nonreasoning animals to God, so Michael, a h igher priest, sacrifices souls of animals that reason.

Like a priest in the Tabernacle, Michael makes off erings to God, which must be h ­ umans since they are the only “animals that reason.” In another thesis about Michael and Gabriel, the two angels are fire and ­water, celestial and invisible: T2K67 ​Through a saying of Kabbalists that the heavens are made of Fire and ­Water, in one stroke we are shown both a theological truth about the Sefirot themselves and the philosophical truth that ele­ments are in the heavens only by their active power.

This lesser philosophical truth applies to fire (’esh) and ­water (mayim) as parts of the word shamayim, the ‘heavens’ vis­i­ble above us. Below the Moon, fire burns life away and too much ­water drowns it. Yet in the heavens, where invisible ele­ments are active though not destructive, fire only gives warmth while w ­ ater cools. A g reater theological truth is that the ­Water and Fire beyond the skies are the Love of S4 and the Judgment of S5, and that S6, called the Heavens, mediates compassionately between them, reconciling Michael in the South (S4) with Gabriel in the North (S5)—as in another thesis: T1K24 ​When Job said who makes peace on high, he understood the Southern ­Water, the Northern Fire, and their Commanders, of whom nothing more should be said.55

The Psalmist who revealed that the Lord flew on a Cherub also sang about “­waters above the heavens,” alluding to the creation story and indicating that Cherubs attend the Divinity amid Seraphic fire with cooler w ­ aters of contemplation. ­These angels with their supercelestial ­waters “praise the Lord in daybreak (antelucanus) hymns.” When Pico attributed this insight to Job, he may have been thinking of God’s question from the whirlwind,

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demanding to know where his servant was “when the morning (matutinus) stars sang together.” Thesis T1K37 explains that Piety, or S4, is the secret of daybreak prayer, so that the singing angelic ­waters are also sefirotic. And S4 is also Abraham, who off ered the first morning prayer, as Isaac (S5) did in the after­noon and Jacob (S6) in the eve­ning.56 In the front ranks of t­ hese holy regiments, Thrones sit in judgment and give strength, but Seraphic love is higher and mightier. And yet “how can anyone judge or love what is unknown,” Pico asked. Since judging and loving both require knowledge, “the Cherub both prepares us with its light for Seraphic fire and . . . ​lights our way ­toward the judgment of Thrones.” Guided by the Areopagite, we must ascend—­like Moses on Sinai—by judging like Thrones, then knowing like Cherubs and fi­nally loving like Seraphs.57 The Cherub is the “knot” that ties t­ hese “primary minds” together, said Pico. Pallas, goddess of wisdom and “protector of contemplative philosophy,” governs this angelic order. Since thesis T2K10 identifies “what Orpheus names Pallas” as Metatron—­within the Seraphic fire surrounding God—it must be Pallas Athena who fi­nally ties the Cherub’s knot: she is a wise goddess, presiding on high as the womanly Wisdom at S2. Pico, who could see Pallas in this Kabbalist way, also learned mysteries from Proclus, from other pagan Platonists and from Ficino, their master explicator. Matching Athena’s powers with heavenly bodies, Proclus reported that “along with the Sun, an amazing power and an order given by Athena (taxis Athênaikê) fashion the All according to the theologians”—­ meaning the revered authors of the Chaldean Oracles. Although Pallas actually had no role in the Chaldean theology, Proclus replaced her with Hecate, also well-­armed and philosophy’s protector in the Oracles. A dif­ fer­ent text known to Pico, the Orphic Hymn to Pallas—­a chant for a goddess born from the brain of Zeus—­attributed “thoughtfulness” to this “­mother of crafts,” though her “mind is a terror.” This maze of allusions to Greek my­thol­ogy, Platonic philosophy, and Kabbalist angelology could scarcely be more arcane. Yet it was the norm for Pico when he wrote his speech.58 To solve such puzzles or set them, the prince had abundant help from his friend Ficino. When the older phi­los­o­pher translated Plato’s dialogues and commented on them, much of the ancient theology that he found in them had already been explicated by Proclus, whose insights Ficino used in his own commentaries. He also put Greek texts by Iamblichus, Porphyry, Synesius, and other Neoplatonists into Latin before he died in 1499.



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In 1492, while Pico was still living, Ficino finished the im­mense task of translating and interpreting all the Enneads by Plotinus. When the job was done, he wrote to his patron Lorenzo about Cosimo de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s grand­father, and also about Pico as Cosimo’s spiritual heir: At the time when I made it pos­si­ble for Plato to be read in Latin, Cosimo’s heroic spirit somehow stirred up the heroic mind of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola so that he would come to Florence—­without being aware of how this happened. Having arrived in Florence in the year when I had given birth to Plato, then, on the very day and nearly the exact hour when I brought him into the world, he asked me about Plato as soon as he greeted me, and I answered him by saying ‘Plato has just come from my ­house ­today, in fact.’ Then he, in our moment of ­great joy and gratitude, immediately spoke words that somehow, with neither of us understanding, persuaded me that Plotinus had to be translated—or rather aroused me. The eff ect truly seems to have been something divine.

­ ehind Ficino’s memory, beneath the astrological correspondences and B calendrical symmetries, some such moment of inspiration no doubt lingered: Pico was a c harismatic prince. But when Ficino first met him—­ around ten years before the Plotinus edition was ready—he was also a boy: immature, arrogant, and careless, even with friends like Marsilio. Sour notes from e­ arlier times must have tempered the festive ­music in 1492. Like Pico, nonetheless, Ficino was dazzled by Platonic arcana. But the se­nior phi­los­o­pher preferred explicating to obfuscating, while ­there can be no doubt that the younger man meant to mystify. If this seems strange, stranger still was ­doing philosophy in this cryptic way. Ever since Socrates, philosophy’s hope has been to clarify our thinking and talking—­even though one phi­los­o­pher’s clarity might not be another’s. And yet Platonists often treated their craft like poetry—­starting with Plato himself—­though his disciples warned that students “without geometry” could not enter the Acad­emy. While Porphyry parsed Aristotle’s logic, however, he also wrote about theurgy. Proclus theorized about magic and commented on Euclid. Both ­were successors of Plotinus, who sometimes spoke like a seer. And reverence for the Orphic Hymns and Chaldean Oracles convinced some of ­these Platonists that wisdom—­a phi­los­o­pher’s truest love—­was encoded in enigmatic verse. Pico’s esoteric philosophy was a “poetic theology” (he used the phrase himself) like the Cave of the Nymphs by Porphyry, like the huge commentaries

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on Plato by Proclus, and like their main vehicle in Quattrocento Italy—­ Ficino’s expositions and translations. Knowing Pico’s sources and models makes his Oration less intractable for us—­given five centuries of learned hindsight—­but contemporaries lacked this perspective.59 Recognizing the wise Pallas as the Cherub, however, we now know which angels Pico wanted ­humans to emulate. Up to this point, the message of the Oration is “to form our lives on the model of the Cherubic life.” Living like angels is what h ­ umans must choose when they exercise the f­ ree choice that makes them astonishing. Although the Cherubic life leads ­people even higher than contemplation, they can also slip down. They can be “carried off to the heights of love and then descend . . . ​for duties of action.” But the holiest travelers never return from beyond the Seraphim, where even contemplation ends in an ecstatic blaze of assimilation to the Deity. Meanwhile, for h ­ umans who “mind the flesh and smell like dirt,” even Cherubs are beyond reach, so pilgrims must look for guidance to the “ancient ­Fathers.” Their advice takes up about a fourth of Pico’s speech.60

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1. ​ Oration III, 16–19 With more than four-­fifths of his speech still to come, Pico no longer worries about choices. He now seeks advice for t­ hose who have already de­cided to climb up to God. First he consults two travelers, Paul and Jacob, who had already made the trip. Paul’s vision of the third heaven, interpreted by the Areopagite, shows how to rise higher a­ fter living the Cherubic life (16). Jacob’s dream of a l adder sees past the body’s sensuality and disunity, which block the ascent (17–19). ­After God made Saul his “chosen vessel” on the road to Damascus, he began his missionary journeys as Paul, a Christian. Writing to other converts in Corinth, he described his experience of ascent to the third heaven. He also preached at the Areopagus in Athens and converted a man named Dionysius, l­ater identified with a writer on angels and mystical theology. This ­later Areopagite revered Paul as “truly divine” and full of “ecstatic power.” The God of his own theology was hidden, unknown, and best described by negations. Kabbalists w ­ ere also reticent about S1, the highest Sefirah—­the Crown that manifests the No-­End or Infinite. Naming God in this taciturn way, according to Pico’s thesis T2K34, ratified the Christian mysteries most alien to Judaism—­the Trinity and Incarnation, teachings that agreed “not only with Kabbalists,” said the prince, “but also with the theology of Dionysius.” Another thesis (T2K8) linked Kabbalah with Paul’s teaching.1 375

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At the top of the angelic hierarchy, as described by Dionysius, w ­ ere Thrones to cleanse sinners, Cherubs to enlighten them, and Seraphs to perfect them. But patterns of four rather than three ­were sanctifying rhythms for other authorities—­like Proclus, a pagan con­temporary of the Areopagite. In his “mystical exposition” of Platonism, Proclus instructed the initiate to be disposed beforehand by ethical virtues . . . ​since, as Socrates said it is not right for the impure to touch the pure. . . . ​He must also be practiced in methods of logical investigation . . . ​since, before roaming through reasoning of vari­ous types, to observe the divine kinds and the truth in them is hard and inaccessible. Third, he cannot be ignorant of natu­ral knowledge and the manifold opinions about it. . . . ​Then, ­after putting all of this together, . . . ​let him shine by taking up the interpretation of the blessed and divine teachings.

If moral purification and m ­ ental illumination led straight to theological completion or perfection, the steps ­were only three. But when catharsis came at two stages—­ethical cleansing for the lower soul, logical purging for the mind—­the ladder had four steps, to match the soul’s “understanding, knowing, believing and sensing.” ­These four psychic faculties ­were grades of ascent. The soul’s image was a triangle, but its three sides ­were fours surrounding a one—­ten ele­ments in all: “through monadic ele­ments, number comes in tens, but for power it lies in fours . . . ​and in the tetrad.” Pythagoreans wore this tetractys as an amulet. Their numerology was fluid and multivalent, condensing 1, 3, 4, and 10 into the same figural number.

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Iamblichus and o ­ thers found five tests of virtue in Plato’s regimen, and Christians elaborated them with biblical material. But Pico’s instructions from the Areopagite directed him to a three-­stage climb from cleansing up through illumination to perfect completion—­a mystic’s vision of what Paul witnessed in heaven. The proj­ect was to move inward as well as



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upward to the divine darkness a­ fter “unconditional withdrawal” from the world and the self. The aim was to become something else—­not to know something new. The initiate forsook knowledge, passing beyond the Cherubic light to enter God’s nameless shadows. Yearning for the divine could be satisfied only by eliminating the subject and its objects.2 Part way up the mystical climb, however, illumination by natu­ral philosophy preceded a perfected “knowledge of divinity.” This was Pico’s revision of the Areopagite’s epopteia, which was ‘seeing’ ‘watching,’ or ‘gazing at’ divinity itself, opening the “eyes that look beyond the world” and “refuse to be dragged down” ­toward Nature and her imperfections. In the end—­for Pico as well—­a ll such activity of the subject dissolved in assimilation, the final peace of deification. To reach this goal, Dionysius treated theology as a regimen and Christian sacraments as theurgy—­ritual god-­ work, in Neoplatonic terms, better than theological god-­talk ­because its energies transmitted the Savior’s power. This practical theology was an “occult tradition (kruphia paradosis)” that the Areopagite revealed only to initiates—an ascetic, ecstatic, esoteric and theurgic mysticism just as otherworldly as the Cherubic life that Pico advocated.3 ­After Paul and the Areopagite—­both of them Christians—­Pico consulted Jacob, a Jew, and began with two images: carving the Throne and climbing the ladder, both from stories of Jacob’s vision of angels. Carving or hewing or engraving was a widespread motif in rabbinical and Kabbalist texts, as in the Bahir: “What is the earth that was carved? It was carved by Heaven, and it is the Throne of God.” A Targum interpreted Jacob’s story to mean that he dreamed of a ladder “fixed in the earth, and the summit of it reached to the height of heaven. And behold, the angels . . . ​ascended to make this known to the angels on high, saying, come, see Jacob the pious, whose likeness is in the ἀ rone of Glory, and whom you have been desirous to see! And behold, the holy angels from before the Lord ascended and descended and looked upon him.” Angels went up the ladder and down again to examine the person whose face they had seen carved into the Throne, as in Ezekiel’s vision: “Upon the likeness of the Throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man.” Could h ­ umans also climb to the Throne? “For the impure to touch the pure is sacrilege,” Pico warned, repeating a lesson from “the mysteries.” This warning was relayed from Socrates through Plutarch and Iamblichus to Proclus when the mysteries w ­ ere still pagan. And the rabbis suggested that Jacob himself may have defiled the rites. As the angels moved “back and forth,” some ascended to exalt the patriarch while o ­ thers descended and rebuked

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him. “It is you whose features are carved on high,” they told him, and then “they ascended on high and saw his features and they descended below and found him sleeping”—­sinning in laziness.4 When Jacob saw angels climbing a ladder, he was sleeping in the dirt. But his dream—­according to Pico—­tells us to forget this lower world and wake to a higher destiny. We too may go down or up, a­ fter washing the dirty hands and feet that would defile the Lord’s ladder. Hands and feet stand for the soul’s “utterly worthless part.” The soul’s foot “means love, called ‘desire’ or ‘lust’ when it is depraved,” according to Augustine, “ ‘aff ection’ or ‘charity’ when it is righ­teous.” In the Asclepius, “pairs of hands and feet . . . ​serve the lower or earthly world.” ­Humans use them, along with ­mental faculties, to explore that world, “and yet, b ­ ecause the heavy and excessive vice of body slows a h ­ uman down, he cannot rightly discern the true ­causes of nature. . . . ​In this bodily life, the plea­sure one takes from possessions is a delight, but this delight is, as they say, a noose round the soul’s neck that keeps mankind tied to the part that makes him mortal.” Pico took ­these last words from the Asclepius without naming his source. He treated the lower soul as a site of pollution by lust and “voluptuary softness,” while accepting Plato’s distinction between irascible (“raging”) and appetitive (“nutritive”) drives in the same part of the soul. Even if we purge the soul’s baser instincts with ethics, as instructed, more discipline w ­ ill be needed: this was a lesson taught by Jacob’s slumbers.5 Jacob’s dream was a way up—by climbing one of the many ladders described in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin texts known to Pico. Neoplatonists treated philosophy as a “ bridge or a l adder,” thinking of Plato’s account of ascent “from rung to rung.” Origen and other early Christians wrote about ladders, and John Climacus based a ­whole mystical program on them: his Ladder of Paradise could be read in Latin ­after 1300. But Pico also knew the “secret of the ladder” from Abulafia’s Ve-­zot and his other writings. Abulafia pictured the unpicturable: a ­spherical cosmic ladder with 360 rungs, rainbows of ascent circling through empyrean space. The same ladder contains all the letters of the Torah written in a circle. Divine Names—­y hw h and Adonai—­are ladders too ­because of their numerical values: sullam (‘ladder,’ 130) = Adonai (‘Lord,’ 65) + Adonai (‘Lord,’ 65) = 5 × yhw h (‘God,’ 26).6 A ladder should be easy to picture. But a ladder g­ oing through the cosmos “from center to center,” as Pico wrote, is hard even to imagine. “Two cir­cuits in the heavens” ­were the soul’s routes to paradise, according to Origen. But in a cosmos of planetary and stellar spheres, which are homo-



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centric, a flight through centers would go nowhere. More useful to Pico, perhaps, was a Book of Imaginary Circles by Ibn al-­Sid al-­Batalyawsi, known to Jews in the prince’s Italy. Convinced that higher realities transcend ordinary geometry, Batalyawsi envisioned a straight line or ladder ­running between two circles which are upper and lower nodes of a cosmic Soul, below the Agent Intellect. Angels move down the line to bring divine power to ­human souls, thus enabling sinners to ascend by the same route.7 “Passing through all t­ hings from center to center,” in Pico’s obscure phrase, was also a way to examine the parts of Nature by using the “power of Titans to tear the One . . . ​into many”—­like the corpse of Osiris, deconstructed, disassembled, fragmented. Titans ­were responsible for the fate of Dionysus, dismembered like Osiris, but Apollo—­a lso called Dionysus as well as Phoebus—­collects what has been scattered. In a thesis on Kabbalah (T2K59) this “blessed reunion”—in a “fourfold arrangement”—­transcends the Remaining, Pro­cession and Reversion of Neoplatonic theology: Pico’s proposition sums up an epic of speculation by using bet (‫)ב‬, a single Hebrew ­ iddle letter character, to work “first with the first letter, medially with a m and last with the last letters.” Combined with alef (‫)א‬, the first all the letters, bet in second place spells ‘av (‫ )אב‬or ­Father. Combined with nun (‫)נ‬, from the ­middle of the alphabet, the same letter spells ben (‫ )בן‬or Son. But bet is also the numeral 2, naming an androgynous Son—­S2 or Wisdom (Hokmah)—­who proceeds from the ­Father at S1. Fi­nally, when bet combines with shin (‫ )ש‬and taw (‫)ת‬, the last two letters of the alphabet, the result is Rest—­Shabbat (‫)שבּת‬. Since the supreme sefirotic triad rests or stops at S3, this “fourfold arrangement” of bet with alef, shin and taw marks the boundary of a Trinity. This solution, inspired by Menahem Recanati’s commentary on the Torah, leaves out seven lower features of divinity. However, if the Sabbath—­using the typical nomenclature—is also the Shekinah at S10, hypostatic pro­cession ­will reach down through all the Sefirot. With its language of ‘descent,’ ‘ascent,’ and ‘rest,’ the Oration only hints at this theology, and nothing in this part of the speech would have caused a Christian of Pico’s time to think of the Hebrew alphabet—­without having seen the “fourfold arrangement” of thesis T2K59. On the other hand, connecting Greek gods with Neoplatonic metaphysics was normal practice for the prince and his learned friends—­instructed by Ficino. In a thesis on Proclus, Apollo is the name of a “third trinity of hypercosmic gods, and reversion befits it.” And the main message of Pico’s speech is clear enough where

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Apollo is the topic: a god of plagues and cures can heal Nature’s broken body and put it back together. Victory for divine unity over a titanic manifold sets the stage for the next part of Pico’s curriculum, moving up ­toward perfection or completion by theology and then to the final unification.8

2. ​ Oration III, 20–25 Although Jacob was a Jew of the covenant, the F ­ ather consulted next by Pico may have been a gentile, according to tradition, or even fictional—­ “Job the just” from the land of Uz. Gersonides thought that Job did not have the Torah, but Maimonides found the “mystery of the universe” in his perplexing story. Pico’s interpretation, in the spirit of Kabbalah, is a maze of fragmentary allusions. He asks Job about God’s angelic armies, declares that “peace” is the answer to his question, and then refers the prob­lem to Empedocles (20). In the heavens above and below in our souls, conflicts described by this pagan sage could be settled—so Pico claimed—in a theological peace sought but not yet found by ethics, logic and natu­ral philosophy (21–23). When ­human souls unite with God in peaceful matrimony, the nuptials are a blessed death for saints—­their reward for changing into angels (25).9 Job’s puzzling story tests faith in providence and the skill of commentators: Why does the “way of the wicked prosper” while good ­people suff er? Like other Kabbalists, Moses ben Nachman (Nahmanides) found an answer in migrating souls: rewards and punishments only seem unfair ­because they have been earned in previous lives and forgotten. The Ramban, whose writings ­were known to Pico, commented on Job twice. But when the prince worked with Flavius to prepare a new Latin version of the biblical book, Gersonides—­not a K abbalist at all—­was the commentator he followed, and what he learned found its way into the Oration. Job himself, according to Gersonides, accepted God’s general providence while denying par­tic­u­lar providence for individuals. The phi­los­o­ pher, a naturalist Aristotelian, saw the physical side of general providence as an astrological determinism that permits foreknowledge. Through dreams, divination, and prophecy—­through magia, as Pico wrote—­the Agent Intellect provides this information to ­humans if they achieve conjunction with the Intellect. By letting the righ­teous see what is determined for them, the Intellect does them a f­ avor, and Gersonides counted this foresight as freedom—­room to maneuver, at least.10



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Like other thinkers influenced by Averroes, Gersonides focused his metaphysics and theology on the Intellect. Abulafia did the same, though not in a philosophical way, writing this in Ve-­zot about Nahmanides: “The holy teacher mentions the mystery of the secret of impregnation in a commentary on Job about . . . ​the secret which is the just person also fares well. On this his judgment is absolute, and the law of justice is known to all with the beginning of thought. And so the wicked person fares badly.” Anxiety about justice perplexed many commentators on Job. The solution, according to Abulafia, was also the key to mysteries of impregnation and the ladder, which Nahmanides had studied. By w ay of Abulafia, some of this sage’s Kabbalist reading of Job eventually reached Pico, who found the Kabbalah compatible with the naturalist determinism of Gersonides.11 None of this, neither theodicy nor mystical conjunction, is on the surface of Pico’s first question to Job: What did God want from his myriads of angels? Angels are everywhere in the Oration, however, and the orator answered immediately: What God wanted was peace, and Job gave the proof when he said that the Lord “makes peace on high.” According to Pico’s thesis T1K24, Job was thinking of “the Southern ­Water, the Northern Fire and their Commanders.” The peace between them was a secret about ­these angelic warriors that Job heard from Bildad, one of his comforters: Power and terror are his who makes peace on high. Can his troops be numbered? On whom does his light not rise? Can a ­human be compared with God and justified, or a man born of w ­ oman look clean?

God created peace by making order (bohu) out of disorder (tohu) on the first day—­a sacred calm that descends through the Sefirot to end the warfare between Michael, commanding the Southern ­Waters (mayim) of S4, and Gabriel, commander of the Northern Fire (’esh) of S5. The two archangels reconcile on the heavenly heights of S6 (shamayim as ’esh + mayim), but Gersonides saw their harmony as a fixed order of stars. Translating Job with help from this phi­los­o­pher also caused Pico to think about other “birds of heaven” that make ­humans wise—­according to Elihu, who was not one of Job’s original three comforters. In thesis T1K28 ­these birds are “angels within the world who appear to ­humans, not ­those who do not appear except in spirit.”12

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Pico took this angel lore from books of Kabbalah. But when he read Gersonides on Job, he also noted that the Bible’s “peace on high” contradicts Empedocles, whose natu­ral philosophy of conflict stands between Job’s higher theology and the lower ethics and logic that are not yet a complete curriculum. Pico also learned from Plutarch that poems by Empedocles on Strife and Friendship echo a “my­thol­ogy of the Magi”—­the Chaldeans and their Oracles. Below the stillness of theology, forces of Nature clash to control the physical world. Souls who linger t­ here are crazed by “strife and discord, cast into the depths and exiled from the gods.”13 In this case, the lesson that Empedocles could teach Christians about Job—as Pico proposed—­was that Nature’s turbulence confuses philosophy and confines it. ­After ethics has tamed our “wild excesses,” dialectic—­ which is neither logic-­chopping nor empty rhe­toric—­will “calm the turmoils of reason” and enable “natu­ral philosophy to s­ ettle disputes and disagreements . . . ​by compelling us to remember that Nature was born of war.” Philosophy could not bring real peace, however: Pico also learned this from Empedocles, a phi­los­o­pher, whose true task was to show a way out of Nature t­ oward theological serenity. Warfare in Nature brings vio­lence, but redemption ends the conflict for Christians: Paul assured them that “though our man that is outward perish, yet the inward one is renewed.” Rebirth is this inner person’s reward for laboring like Hercules to kill the Hydra and the Nemean lion, monsters of lust and anger—­appetitive and irascible vices that ethics must overcome, as ancient Romans killed a pig to seal a treaty of peace. The threat of lust may have caused Job—as Pico understood his story—to make a “covenant with the God of life before he began his own life.”14 The word ‘covenant’ (foedus) occurs only once in the Vulgate text of Job—­unremarkable if this just man was not a circumcised Jew. Job remembered “making a c ovenant with my eyes,” however, “not even to think about a y oung w ­ oman,” which does not show that he made this pledge before he was born. But Bildad, Job’s comforter who spoke about “peace on high,” added that no “man born of ­woman can look clean.” Once Job was born, then, he could not be chaste: maybe this was Pico’s point. Like other Kabbalists, maybe he was also thinking of the discomforting Elihu and his anger at Job’s protests of innocence: Let him look p ­ eople in the eye and say I have sinned; truly have I failed, gaining nothing b­ ecause I was unworthy.



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Then he has freed his soul from ­going down to destruction, and he ­shall see the light and live. Look, God does all ­t hese ­t hings thrice over for each person to save souls from corruption.

Nahmanides saw a m ystery in Elihu’s words: transmigration. The Bahir and the Zohar ­were more explicit, stating that God gives sinners three chances: “whenever a p erson is unsuccessful in this world, the blessed Holy One uproots and replants him.” Without endorsing this doctrine, Pico’s thesis 1K41 alludes to it in language taken from the Bahir: T1K41 ​­Every good soul is a new soul coming from the East,

where S9, the trea­sury of souls, is the East. One chain of migrated souls linked Job with Terah—­Abraham’s pagan ­father and yet a v essel of the covenant—­putting Job in line to inherit a covenant made for him before he was born. Empedocles, the poet of Love and Strife, was also a prophet of metempsychosis. When Pico described the ­human chameleon, he cited this pagan’s grim teaching that souls migrate “even into plants.” By a lso consulting Empedocles about Job, the prince called on heathen philosophy along with Kabbalah and the naturalism of Gersonides to reinforce a key theme of his speech—­man’s polymorphous potential for exaltation or abasement.15 But mutability is a flaw in h ­ uman nature: Pico learned this from Empedocles, who also convinced him that “Nature was born of war.” And yet another Greek sage, Heraclitus, complained that this insight had been lost on Homer. The Poet wanted Strife to vanish, which would have eliminated the All by canceling its origin. On the contrary: conflicts may be settled, but in Nature ­there ­will always be more, and only theology ­will rise above them. Not philosophy, then, but the theology that transcends it off ers the “holiest peace”—­the perfect Pythagorean friendship that ­will erase individual diff erences, “the peace that God makes on high” between his angelic armies, who then descend to earth so that h ­ umans, “ascending to heaven, might be made into angels.” This angel magic—­a theurgy to emulate Enoch’s transformation into Metatron—is a j oyous surrender of h ­ uman personality when all traces of the individual dissolve in God’s supernal peace. “Let us wish this peace for our friends,” Pico exults, “for our time, for ­every ­house we enter.”16

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On the other hand, Pico’s “friendship of the single-­souled” might be just a salute to ­human community, nothing more than cheerleading for a fellowship of man. When Maimonides addressed the same theme, however, his point was deeper and philosophical, claiming that multiplicity is logically and metaphysically impossible for immortal souls. He cited Ibn Bajja (Avempace) to prove that all souls, once gone to God, “are one in number.” Like other Muslim thinkers ­after Farabi, Ibn Bajja had taught that the individual soul’s conjunction with the Agent Intellect erased its individuality. Farabi was less decisive, however, writing that virtuous souls, ­after their bodies die, “form as it w ­ ere a single soul”—­just an afterlife of communal bliss, perhaps, and eventually he denied the possibility of conjunction. Ibn Tufayl (Abubacer), however, in a work translated by Pico in 1493, was emphatic about extinction in the Godhead. The perfect mystic sought “his own obliteration, . . . ​and the heavens and earth and every­ thing in between them receded from his recollection and reflection. . . . ​ His essence receded along with the rest of the essences; all vanished and faded away. . . . ​Only the one true permanent Existent remained. . . . ​He was obliterated in his own essence, . . . ​seeing nothing in existence but the One, the Living, the Everlasting.”17 The self is luggage left ­behind in the ascent. And like Jacob’s vision, the tale of Job shows why renouncing the self is a v ictory. ­After theological peace has been achieved, the final triumph is a k ind of death—­the holy “death of the kiss” bestowed by God on Jacob and other patriarchs. A soul that attains the peace of theology receives the “King of Glory” and welcomes him not “as a guest but as a spouse.” Entering the King’s domain, the soul “­will wish to die in herself so that she might live in her spouse.” Pico’s theme of nuptial death comes from a Psalm that praises an anointed warrior-­k ing, whose robe, scepter, palaces and royal brides display his majesty. The Psalmist advises a prospective princess: Look h ­ ere, ­daughter, listen and lend an ear; forget your ­people and the ­house of your ­father, and let the King desire your beauty ­because he is the Lord your God. . . . From within comes all the glory of this royal d ­ aughter, fringed in gold and garbed in finery.

The Bahir complicates this advice by asking questions and answering them in sefirotic code: “Can the king sit with his ­daughter all day? Not at all, you



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say. What to do? He made a win­dow between himself and her, and whenever the ­daughter had need of her parent or the ­father of the ­daughter, they would join together through the win­dow. That is what is written: ἀ e King’s ­daughter within is glorious, in her garment with fringes of gold.” Three consonants—­zayin, he and bet—­conceal the meaning of ­these “fringes” in zahab, the word for ‘gold.’ Zayin stands for zachar, which means ‘male.’ He, the numeral 5, is the soul’s female princi­ple ­because five Hebrew words, all feminine in gender, mean ‘soul.’ The final bet in zahab—­the numeral 2—is twain, a pair or a dyad, coupling the male zayin with the female he in the gold that adorns the bride: this is the “golden garment like a wedding gown” where Pico saw the “manifold” wisdom of natu­ral philosophy. Wringing ­every drop of meaning from the letter bet, the Bahir remembers the h ­ ouse (bayit) “built with wisdom” in Proverbs, where Wisdom or S2 has a ­woman’s name, Hokmah. Her s­ ister near the top of the Sefirot is Understanding, S3 or Binah. Like bayit, Binah starts with bet. And since the Psalm takes the king’s ­daughter (bat) away from her ­family, she is also S10, the exiled Shekinah—­a lower Understanding and Wisdom less exalted than S3 and S2.18 Three of Pico’s ­theses display bet’s secrets without explaining them: T1K9 ​By the six Days of Genesis we are given to understand the Building’s six Extremities that come forth from Bereshit just as Cedars come from Lebanon. T1K10 ​It is more correct to say that Paradise is the ­whole Building than that it is the tenth, and in the ­middle of it is placed the ­great Adam who is Tiferet. T1K17 ​Wherever Scripture mentions love between male and female, we are given a m ystical repre­sen­ta­tion of Tiferet’s conjunction with the Congregation of Israel or of bet’s with Tiferet.

Bereshit—­“ in (be-) the beginning (-­reshit)”—­begins the creation story, and Reshit, ‘Beginning,’ is another name of S2. Bereshit can also be read as two other words, bara shit, “created six.” But which six ­were created? The Zohar’s sages looked to six Extremities of the Building that ­houses the Sefirot below S3—­excluding S10. Recanati also taught that six Sefirot “come forth” from Reshit, but he included S10 in his list of Days or Cedars while leaving S9 out. To name the Sefirot, he followed the Zohar to a biblical passage that some Christians also used in their Lord’s Prayer to praise God’s “kingdom, power, and glory”—­more clues for Pico.

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Recanati not only named God’s attributes but also mapped their relations, like the nuptials of S6 and S10—­Tiferet and the Shekinah. Tiferet (Beauty) is the male partner, called Adam and Jacob—­though Pico also located Jesus at S6. A c ommandment against adultery showed Recanati a secret about the “­union of Tiferet with the Shekinah,” and Pico restated it in thesis T1K17. Part of the secret was about God’s sexuality, as so often in books of Kabbalah, and S10 is the womanly Shekinah or Dwelling. As Pico wrote, “the King of Glory” ­will “make his dwelling with her.” But S10 is also the Congregation of Israel, and Tiferet’s joining with her—­mirroring ­human conjunction with the Agent Intellect—is divine copulation. S6 repeats this sacred intercourse by also marrying S3, the bet of Binah in T1K17.19 Less sensual responses to the ancient theme of sacred marriage ­were well known to Jews and Christians—­Rashi and Bernard of Clairvaux, for example—­who hunted for pious allegories in the erotic Song of Songs. Pico was also shy about God’s sexuality in his speech. He said more in thesis T1K17, however, though only Flavius or other learned Jews could have understood him. On the other hand, ­every Christian would have recognized the “King of Glory” when the prince assured them that Christ might “make his dwelling” in their souls. They all wanted the Lord to dwell in their souls: a prayer in e­ very Mass reminded them of the Centurion in the Gospel who called his dwelling unworthy of Jesus—­just like themselves. But if Christ’s bride was the Shekinah—­not the Church, as Christians ­were taught—­there was sexuality within the Godhead: a disturbing idea. Small won­der that Pico was quiet about it.20 ­After the royal bride has put on “courtly” robes of natu­ral philosophy, and ­after she has “decked the tops of her gates with garlands of theology,” the King comes down to dwell with her: this is Pico’s hope for h ­ uman souls. But the Bahir frets about such marriages. The three highest Sefirot are the three ‘holies’ of Isaiah’s Seraphic blessing: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts; the ­whole earth is full of his glory.” A parable shows that God’s Glory is “like a k ing who kept a queen in his hall where she delighted the w ­ hole army, and she had handsome sons who used to come ­every day to see the king, greet him with blessings and ask where is our ­mother? He answered, you cannot see her now, and they said, blessings to her, wherever she is.” Her place was unknown, in other words. But Ezekiel heard a spirit say “blessed be the glory of God from his place,” and Kabbalists described God’s place in a similar parable: “­There was a king’s ­daughter who came from a distant place, far away, and no one knew where she came



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from, u ­ ntil they saw that she was honorable, beautiful, brave and obedient in every­thing she did. ἀ en she, this zot, they said, was certainly taken from the side of light ­because what she does lights up the ­whole world.” The luminous ­daughter from afar named zot—­‘this one’—­was S10, the Shekinah, the Sefirah farthest from S1: this lower Understanding and Wisdom was God’s Knowledge, glorious but dimly perceived by h ­ umans.21 In ­these theosophical tales about missing ­mothers and ­daughters from far away, the leading roles go to divine actors—­a King and royal w ­ omen: Wisdom, Knowledge, Understanding, and the Shekinah. Pico did not identify t­ hese w ­ omen for his audience of Christians, however: he could not expect them to see past the usual allegories to the gendered hypostases and hermeneutic puns that he knew from books of Kabbalah. Some Kabbalists described the Shekinah as “the bride (kalah) incorporated from every­ thing,” punning on the verb kalal to suggest a receptacle (keli) with no content of its own, a container filled “from every­thing (min ha-­kol).” Likewise, a mutable h ­ uman with “nothing of his own” could have “what­ever was reserved for ­every other being,” according to the Oration. Did Kabbalah suggest this hazy idea to Pico?22 The soul is a bride whose spouse is a King. “Who is this King of Glory,” the Psalmist asked, and angels had the answer: three troops of angels chant the Psalm and guard the eve­ning hours, according to the Zohar, to defend the righ­teous against “ravaging bands of dazzling demons.” Another question from the Psalmist concerns sleepers who get a “taste of death” as “their souls depart to ascend,” and it is the angels on watch who decide which souls may go up. If a person prays disrespectfully, “the Angel of Death comes upon him prematurely. And when his soul departs, he ­will not gaze upon the radiance of the Shekinah, nor w ­ ill he die by a kiss.” Pico warns about this m ­ istake in a thesis: T2K13 ​One who works at Kabbalah and mixes in nothing extraneous, if he stays long at the work, ­w ill die from binsica, and if he makes a ­mistake in the work or comes to it unpurified, he ­w ill be devoured by Azazel through the Attribute of Judgment.

Binsica—­‘ kiss’ (neshiqah) preceded by ‘in’ (be)—is described by another thesis: T2K11 ​The way (though Kabbalists leave it unspoken) in which rational souls are sacrificed to God by an archangel happens only by the soul’s

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parting from the body, not the body’s parting from the soul—­except secondarily, as it happens in the death of the kiss, of which it is written: the death of his saints is precious in the sight of the Lord.

Plotinus, explicating Plato, welcomed death as “but the parting of the soul from the body, an event that no one can dread whose delight is to be his unmingled self, . . . ​becoming like to God.” Maimonides, who understood prophetic rapture as u ­ nion with the Agent Intellect, applied his theory to rabbinic accounts of patriarchs ­dying by God’s kiss, and Gersonides agreed—in a commentary on the Song of Songs made (and meddled with) by Flavius for Pico. This rapturous death, said the prince, is “life in its fullness.” It is the death “that sages have said one practices when ­doing philosophy,” as Socrates told his students on the day when he died.23 The Areopagite taught that saints die only to this world when they rise to the “peaceful oneness of the One” ­after discarding earthly lusts and enmities that spoil the “unified and undivided life.” Plato concurred: the body is a tomb for the soul, the world is a prison from which it must escape, and philosophy prepares sages for the death that they desire. “We should make all speed to take flight from this world to the other,” said Socrates, in words that also describe Pico’s purpose in advocating the Cherubic life. As souls seek mystical marriage with the Almighty, the hidden God reaches down through the Sefirot ­until the last of them—­the Shekinah and God’s Understanding—­touches mortal creatures and banishes herself to help them ascend. Just as Kabbalists left a win­dow open between the King and his d ­ aughter’s illumination, Pico studied natu­ral philosophy (including natu­ral magic) as a bridge from moral and ­mental catharsis to theological meditation. Nature was only a b ridge, however, to be crossed and left ­behind.24

3. ​ Oration III, 26–32 The same world-­escaping lessons taught by Paul, Jacob, and Job ­were precepts confirmed for Pico by Moses, the second Jewish hero (or the third, counting Job) in the Oration’s pro­cession of ­Fathers. Moses made rules for admittance to the Tabernacle and its precincts (26), where the rituals w ­ ere like rites in pagan mysteries (27). Both Jewish and Gentile liturgies led up past theology to self-­extinction (28–29). Especially close to Mosaic practice ­were maxims, prophecies, and mysteries of Apollo (30). Apollo is also



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Bacchus and Jesus, and Pythagoras wrote rules to regulate admission to their rites (31–32). Although Moses climbed ­toward the “darkness of unknowing,” according to the Areopagite, he never got to see the hidden God—­a disappointment confirmed by Kabbalah. Pico introduced Moses not as a failed initiate, however, but as a g uide for other pilgrims progressing through the Tabernacle’s chambers. Speculation on this edifice is abundant in Kabbalah, all of whose secrets could be traced to Moses: Abulafia wrote in Ve-­zot that a Kabbalist is one who has received wisdom “from his master—­and that master from his master, and that master from another master, and so on in succession back to Moses, who received it from the mouth of Divinity.”25 Moses designed the Tabernacle on God’s instructions while wandering in the wilderness, and he never entered the Promised Land. From a theosophical perspective, he passed through the forty-­nine gates of the seven lower Sefirot (S4–10) but not the fiftieth portal of Understanding at S3, guarded by mightier angels. His rules about the Tabernacle are symbolic in ­every detail, mysteries revealed only to ­those fit to enter the Holy of Holies. This place where God dwelled “resembled the pattern above,” according to the Zohar, but it was also a “ body that contains spirit inside.” Abulafia agreed that the Tabernacle’s layout was “like the structure of the h ­ uman body and the body of the cosmos with three worlds.” Just as Knowledge (S1b), Wisdom (S2) and Understanding (S3), a h igher triad of Sefirot, assisted the Creator in the beginning, so also “by t­ hese three the Dwelling was built”—­meaning both the Shekinah (S10) below in sefirotic space and also the Tabernacle on earth. Every­thing that was “created in this world, He created above, and all was traced in making the Dwelling.”26 The cosmos was a template for the Tabernacle, and Pico modeled his curriculum on its compartments. Waiting outside the sacred precinct—­like priests from pagan Thessaly who honored their god by not entering his shrine—­a group of supplicants stood in the courtyard, not yet purified by ethics. A second group, their morals purged, entered the sanctuary as Levites, but they could touch nothing sacred ­until dialectic had prepared them to join in the rites. Still outside the veil while taking instruction in natu­ral philosophy, a third group contemplated three barriers—­the curtain itself, candelabra, and coverings of skin—­that blocked their view of the Holy of Holies. Only a fourth group could study the theology that gave a clearer look at God. But three was the number—­not four—­that governed traditional conceptions of the Tabernacle: only the High Priest could enter the inmost

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sanctuary (3); p ­ eople other than priests ­were restricted to an outer courtyard (1); lesser priests could move through a zone (2) in between and cross internal barriers, including a curtain of animal skins. Barriers like ­these skins divide inner and outer levels of the Zohar’s cosmos, of which Adam is a microcosm: God gave him skins to cover his shame, and sinful flesh obstructed the ­human spirit ­until it was “stripped of ­those garments” and ascended. Two of Pico’s t­ heses (T2Z8–9) on Zoroaster and the Chaldean Oracles follow the usual three-­part plan for the Tabernacle. Adam’s “garments of skin”—­his own flesh as well as his clothing—­signify the “three-­layered wrapping” that covers the soul fallen into the body: the wrappings are the body’s clothing, the body itself, and the soul’s ‘vehicle.’ “The vehicle of ­every individual soul descends by adding garments,” according to Proclus, though l­ater it may ascend and shed them. Garments acquired when souls fall into bodies through the heavens are like “skins that ­were in the Tabernacle” ­because vestments of both types are “heavenly, spiritual, and earthly” and signify a “threefold dwelling”: one type for souls described by Proclus, the other for worshippers in the Tabernacle ­imagined by Pico.27 The prince stayed with a t­ riple pattern in his Conclusions, but his curriculum in the Oration takes four steps up to an “exalted theology.” ­Those who reach the “­temple’s inner sanctum” enjoy an epopteia—­a glimpse of God while “drunk on the nectar of eternity” yet “still dwelling on earth.” “Socratic frenzies” induce this ecstasy, but Socrates himself had been warned that “complete visions” might elude initiates who failed to prepare properly. Proclus specified that “completing precedes the initiating, which itself precedes the seeing (epopteia).” He also identified the “full seeing of the complete mysteries” with Plato’s “fourth sort of madness . . . ​and best of all forms of divine possession.” This erotic rapture—­higher than prophetic, priestly or poetic frenzies—­causes the lover of au­then­tic beauty to grow wings and soar beyond the body’s beauty. “Caring nothing for the world beneath” b ­ ecause it “lies in wickedness,” as scripture says, the initiate must take Pico’s advice and go “rushing away.” The manic lover scorns Nature’s allurements. Like the robes of Isis, ­these material beauties are seductive in their variety, in contrast to the plain garb of Osiris. “The beginning is pure, the first and intelligible unmixed,” as Plutarch explained, “but using what is sensible and available provides views and revelations of t­ hose ­things as they change this way or that. Still, the intellection of the intelligible, unalloyed and s­ imple, flashing



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like lightning through the soul, gives but one chance to make contact and observe. This is why Plato and Aristotle call this part of philosophy epoptic, ­because ­those who by reasoning have moved beyond all ­those confused ­matters of opinion—­leaping ­toward the primary, ­simple and immaterial, somehow touching the pure truth of it—­hold that their grasp of the complete philosophy is perfect.” Only t­ hose perfected by this philosophy, according to Pico, ­will be “swept up by Socratic frenzies that take us outside the mind, putting us and our minds in God.”28 The prince framed his next statement with a Psalm about getting drunk on God’s bounty, and the keys to the Kabbalah hidden ­there are three of his ­theses, one Chaldean (Z), one Orphic (Or) and one Kabbalist (K): Orpheus—­a songster like David and a pagan theologian like the Chaldeans—­ presides over all three conclusions. T2Z6 ​Statements by Chaldean translators about aphorism 11 on the double drunkenness of Bacchus and Silenus are completely intelligible through statements by Kabbalists about the double wine. T2Or24 ​He ­w ill not get drunk on any Bacchus who has not first been joined to his own Muse. T2K17 ​One who knows what the Purest Wine is for Kabbalists w ­ ill know why David said I ­will be made drunk on the bounty of your ­house, and what the drunkenness was that the ancient prophet Musaeus called happiness, and what each of ­t hese Bacchi signifies according to Orpheus.

To explain how God’s bounty makes h ­ umans drunk, Pico wrote that “Bacchus leads the Muses while we philosophize and he shows us God’s invisible ­things in his mysteries—­Nature’s vis­i­ble signs.” What does a tipsy Bacchus have to do with Muses, mistresses of culture, and what do they have to do with Nature? Even by Pico’s standards, t­ hese “secret rites” are obscure. He may have learned about them from Ficino, who wrote that the wine god leads the nine ­sisters, heading a c osmic hierarchy where one Muse rules each of eight celestial spheres while Calliope helps Bacchus conduct them all.29 Thesis T2Z6 comments on a fragment (“aphorism 11”) of the Chaldean ­ uman soul is perfectly and Oracles, which says only that the immortal h divinely drunk. But the Zohar and other books of Kabbalah describe two kinds of vine—­one pure and “supreme” for the righ­teous Israel and the Shekinah (Bacchus, perhaps), the other mixed and “alien” for the sinful

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Israel and Sodom (perhaps Silenus). In the Orphic Hymns, however, the ugly Silenus is a f oster ­father for Bacchus: physical inebriation begets divine inebriation. But in the Oration the “double drunkenness” of T2Z6 is a “double frenzy” and both kinds are good—­perhaps the two higher madnesses combined, prophetic and erotic, anticipating both Apollo and Aphrodite in the next passages of the speech.30 Apollo leads the Muses, but Bacchus is also in charge ­because Dionysus and Bacchus are names of Apollo, and the drunken god “shows us God’s invisible ­things.” Paul gave Pico this proof-­text for natu­ral theology, which infers the Creator’s existence and properties from observations about Nature. Students of this theology sing prophecies “like Phoebus” and must be “faithful in all of this” like Moses. Also called Musaeus—­the teacher of Orpheus who pours wine for the pious in Hades—­Moses is the paragon of fidelity who transmits the Torah “from utterance to utterance, from Faithful to faithful,” as the rabbis said. This greatest prophet sanctifies Apollo’s heathen ravings: the god’s vatic madness, lowest of Plato’s frenzies, sees past and f­ uture events from the pre­sent, envisioning “what is, what w ­ ill be and what has been.” But time leaves beauty untouched when Aphrodite excites Eros in the soul. Hence, an Apollo whose madness is less than erotic is not the “true Apollo” whose Gospel is the light of the world. And yet the old pagan god “is no less a phi­los­o­pher than a prophet.”31 ‘Jesus’ is Apollo’s real name, but maxims from the shrine at Delphi that Pico examined ­were pagan. Plutarch, a priest at the sanctuary, analyzed three of ­t hese gnomic sayings. Instructing initiates in the natu­ral virtues of temperance, wisdom, and justice, the sayings belong to ethics but also to natu­ral philosophy and theology—­t he curriculum that leads to Kabbalah and converges on Plutarch’s explication of the Delphic E, a letter that he saw displayed in the sacred precinct. In Greek script, this E is the numeral 5, like ‫ ה‬in Hebrew: Plutarch’s investigation of letters as numbers was like the numerology of Kabbalah. He recalled how his teacher Ammonius explained Apollo’s “sacred names,” and he tied them to four stages of intellectual development: initial inquiry, partial truth, knowledge, and philosophy. But he also stressed the god’s unity and purity, beyond reach of mortals yet disclosed by certain names of the deity: ‘Apollo’ denies plurality (a-­polla); ‘Ieius’ asserts unity (ia); and ‘Phoebus’ declares purity (phoibos). Thessalian priests “do Phoebus” by staying outside their ­temples to purify themselves—­for Pico, a c onfirmation of Mosaic rules for the Tabernacle.



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All Apollo’s names, if they are genuine, proclaim constancy and exclude mutability. If a god governs “nature in generation and corruption,” however, this must be a d if­fer­ent divinity or demon with a d if­fer­ent name. Nonetheless, Plutarch also recorded a conflicting opinion: that Dionysus and Apollo are the same—­Apollonian order from one perspective, Dionysian frenzy from another. This insight licensed Pico’s move from a drunken Bacchus to an Apollo in prophetic frenzy, from division and complexity in the natu­ral world to unification and simplicity in the divine.32 Guiding the arrogant Alcibiades to self-­k nowledge, Socrates alluded to one of the three Delphic maxims—­‘know yourself’—­without stating it. Rather than repeat the saying, he interpreted it to mean ‘see yourself,’ as when an eye sees itself reflected in another person’s eye. This ocular and reflexive self-­k nowledge is the same as self-­control—­the lesson of ‘nothing in excess,’ another unstated maxim. In the first Alcibiades—­one of two dialogues named in this part of Pico’s speech—­Socrates indoctrinates his student with wisdom that starts with self-­awareness. This wisdom—­the first of four cardinal virtues taught to Persian princes—­comes from “the magic of Zoroaster.” Then a second Persian tutor imparts self-­control. The Persian prophet, as Pico saw him, was the first to teach self-­seeing, which was also an Apollonian and Socratic lesson.33 Zoroaster was a prophet, Socrates was a phi­los­o­pher, but Apollo is both. Ammonius taught Plutarch that the Delphic ei was spoken to this god in the second person—­a ‘you are’ that denies change and affirms unity. “With this theological greeting we address the true Apollo,” Pico declared, but only ­after due preparation. If ‘you are’ is a salutation to changeless divinity, ‘know yourself’ is a “reminder to mortal man of his nature and his weakness.” This is how Ammonius read the saying. But for Pico it was an exhortation to “know the ­whole of Nature” and ­human nature with it. He had already cited ‘nothing in excess’ as an ethical baseline for understanding nature through philosophy in order to address God theologically: Apollo’s way was a regimen, guided by a “norm and rule for all virtues through the method of the mean presented by morality.”34 When Delphic greetings come down from the One, their force is irresistible: in Ficino’s words, “Jupiter seizes Apollo, Apollo illuminates the Muses and Muses arouse . . . ​the poets.” Religion is an education: to be saved, begin by reading the poets and mastering the liberal arts. ­Later, however, the ascent becomes ecstatic when “Jupiter seizes Apollo” to induce poetic arousal. The philosophical scripture that authorizes ecstasy—­“Socratic

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frenzies sung by Plato”—is the Phaedrus, the other dialogue besides the Alcibiades named in this part of the speech. Recapitulating Plato’s myth, Pico explained that initiation proceeds by forgetting the body. The climax comes when we look upon “primeval beauty” as its “winged lovers.” Then, “driven wild by desire . . . ​and transported beyond ourselves like burning Seraphs, . . . ​we ­shall be ourselves no longer, but ­shall be Him, the very One who made us.” To lead the soul through ascetic praxis to erotic ecstasy was the aim of Platonic spirituality, described immortally by Plotinus: Exulting like Bacchus, . . . ​straining upwards, . . . ​and longing to break away from the body . . . ​are emotions of souls ­under the spell of love. . . . ​ The ancients teach that . . . ​­every virtue . . . ​is purification. . . . ​In the soul’s becoming a good and beautiful t­ hing is its becoming like God. . . . ​Therefore we must ascend again ­towards the Good, the desired of ­every soul . . . ​ ­until, passing on the upward way all that is other than God, each in the solitude of himself ­shall behold that solitary-­dwelling Existence, the Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure. . . . ​And one that ­shall know this vision—­ with what passion of love s­ hall he not be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with This, what wondering delight?

Despite the sensual language, love’s proper object is immaterial, and erôs must escape the world in order to meld with the One.35 Even sublimated ecstasy is unruly, however. Synesius, a Christian Neoplatonist studied by Ficino and known to Pico, therefore argued for a modified rapture that could sustain community, culture, and politics. To jump past ­human frailty straight to contemplation would be impulsive and in­eff ec­tive. A r ush to ecstasy would be barbarian, a “ Bacchic frenzy, a manic, enthusiastic leap to win the race without ­running it.” Synesius conceded that the mysteries aim “not to learn anything but to have an experience and be put in a certain state.” Yet the Greek way of taking small steps, like g­ oing up a ladder, seemed better to him than a direct assault on the deity. Since ­humans are not pure contemplators, their best path to the visionary state would start with educated experience. To rise above all experience, both Greeks and barbarians cultivated cathartic virtues, but only Greeks like himself, according to Synesius, practiced them in a mea­ sured and eff ective way. The Cherubic life, like this Greek curriculum, needed a regimen of virtues to reach the “topmost height of theology’s watchtower.” But what Pico



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sought ­there, unlike Synesius, was erôs and ecstasy—to be “transported beyond ourselves.” At the summit comes immersion in God and extinction of the self. “We s­ hall be ourselves no longer”: the surrender could not be more explicit. Souls in this blessed state, just before vanis­hing in God, are “past all threat of illness”—­like Socrates ­after drinking the hemlock and asking a student to pay a cock to Asclepius, the “physician of souls,” and Aesculapius in the Oration. The request reminded the orator of advice from Pythagoras “to feed the cock,” and this led him to a magical cock feared by lions, to another bird in the Vulgate Book of Job and then another in the Gospel passion story.36 The cascade of symbols is impossible to miss but hard to decipher and a strange way to do philosophy. Pico learned this arcane method not only from Kabbalah but also from Iamblichus and Proclus. They and other Neoplatonists treated philosophy as a regimen and regarded philosophical friendship as closed to the uninitiated. To identify the elect, ­these sages used sumbola or passwords with meanings known only to themselves: what ­others heard was a silence called ‘Pythagorean’ by its custodians. Pythagoras himself left his disciples ‘instructions’ as terse as the Delphic sayings. A long list of precepts, thirty-­nine in all, was compiled by Iamblichus, whose interpretations are reflected in Pico’s but are not exactly the same.37 The prince commented on four instructions, including the order to “feed the cock”: in its fuller version, Feed the cock but do not sacrifice it, for it is dedicated to the Moon and Sun.

This command starts with a p ositive precept, but the other three are entirely negative: Do not urinate while turned t­ oward the Sun. Do not sit on a grain-­measure. Do not trim your nails during a sacrifice.

In Pico’s curriculum, t­ hese are rules about ethics and logic that guide initiates through the “mysteries of Bacchus” in natu­ral philosophy and then up to theology. The rules govern comportment, sequence, and timing. To find the Sun of theology, students must look up to the heavens, but not while urinating to expel “overflowing plea­sure.” Since Pythagorean friendship admits unworthy pupils, the rites of philosophy discard nothing: hence, nails are not to be clipped during a sacrifice, even to “cut back the sharp edges of wrath.” Passions must be eliminated, in other words, but only at the

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right moment. And students ­will take care “not to sit on the bushel”—­a grain-­measure—­unless they are too lazy for the “rule and practice of dialectic,” which is a difficult art that escapes physical mea­sure­ment. ­These injunctions prepare initiates to “feed the cock—to nourish our soul’s divine part, in other words, with knowledge of divinity.” Priests feed the holy bird at one moment in order to sacrifice it at another, just as philosophy and theology nurture the soul to help it expire in ecstasy.38 The cock is sacred to the Moon, the Sun, and therefore Apollo. Its celestial avatar feeds on ambrosia, nourishment for souls that fly beyond the heavens in the Phaedrus myth. This “solid food,” as Pico described it, is reliable and derived purely from the highest powers: a cock that eats it is not of this world. But lions ­here below fear the sacred bird’s cousins when they come too close: in grander terms, as Proclus explained, the aerial nature of birds puts them above earthbound animals in a m etaphysical structure that directs magical energy down through the physical cosmos. Lucretius and Pliny also reported that the lion fears the cock. But Proverbs contradicted the pagan folklore: t­ here the lion fears nothing, not even the cock mentioned by the Vulgate in the same breath. The Latin Book of Job calls a c ock “intelligent” where the Hebrew is uncertain and where no bird appears in the Authorized Version when it asks “who hath given understanding to the heart.” But the reading ­adopted by the Vulgate was known to Talmudists who ruled on the conduct of morning prayers. When the leader of the congregation “hears the cock crowing, he should say blessed is He who has given to the cock understanding to distinguish between day and night.” In Pico’s account, the bird knows when Apollo’s Sun w ­ ill rise out of Bacchic Nature. In the Book of Job, it has the gift of discernment, like the rooster that warned Peter to “return to his senses,” just as a cock owed to Asclepius urged Socrates to leave the body. The phi­los­o­pher’s god was a “physician of souls” who healed with death. Like Socrates, Plotinus also wanted to “flee to the beloved Fatherland” in order to “join his spirit’s divinity to the divinity of a greater world.”39 The story of Socrates and the cock that closes Pico’s sixth exposition of the Cherubic life also closes Plato’s Phaedo—­where philosophy is practicing for death. But the dif­fer­ent types of death examined by phi­los­o­phers vexed some of them. Porphyry left an unusually incisive statement: “Death is of two kinds: in the one commonly recognized, the body leaves the soul; in that of phi­los­o­phers, the soul leaves the body; and the one by no means follows from the other.” Like Socrates and the Kabbalists, Porphyry saw a



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certain kind of death as desirable. To repeat Plotinus, his teacher: “the parting of the soul from the body is an event which no one can dread whose delight is to be his unmingled self.” Some gifted spirits can leave the body in ecstasy and return to it. But the ascent was so remote from ordinary life for Plotinus—so abstracted was his point of view and so inward—­that he took l­ ittle notice of the banal prospect of death. For his students, however, practical realities of escaping the body as well as its philosophical consequences w ­ ere troubling. “Who would not wish to dine with the gods while still dwelling on earth . . . ​and drunk on the nectar of eternity?” Pico’s question suggests that disembodied souls can have visions of divinity and then re-­enter their bodies—­like Paul, who saw the third heaven and lived to tell about it. Elsewhere, however, the prince embraced not only the death of the body but also extinction of the self. The way out was the better way, as Plotinus insisted, interpreting Plato: the sage seeks the “final disengagement; he ­will live, no longer, the h ­ uman life of the good man—­such as civic virtue commends—­but, leaving this beneath him, ­will take up instead another life, that of the gods.” When Pico stated in a thesis on Plotinus that “civic virtues are not to be called virtues without qualification,” this was his point. He thought of mystical ascent more as Plotinus or Porphyry or Iamblichus did than Augustine, who saw mysticism as a lifelong strug­gle to conform the soul’s faculties to the architecture of the Trinity. A durable discipline like Augustine’s could do without the rituals recommended by Iamblichus while also avoiding the erotic and ecstatic ­union praised by Plato and Plotinus. The Bishop also grounded his mysticism in the incarnation, tying the hope of carnal sinners to the Word made flesh. But Pico mentioned the incarnation only once in the Oration—in a list of doctrines supported by Kabbalah. This fundamental dogma has no other role in his speech, whose mysticism is Dionysian, Kabbalist and Neoplatonic. His ascetic, erotic, ecstatic and fi­nally thanatic proj­ect fixed his stance ­toward the body and the world, despised as unclean and fled as unholy. It also fixed the role of the self in his Cherubic program: a person’s happiest end was to be consumed in the Godhead.40

4. ​ Oration III, 33–35 Pico’s seventh and final exposition of the Cherubic life starts with Zoroaster and his Chaldean disciples. The prophet taught them that a soul can

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regrow its lost wings by washing them in the w ­ aters of life from Eden’s rivers and then drinking from t­ hose streams (33). A ­ fter cleansing their eyes with ethics and correcting their vision with dialectic, souls w ­ ill be fit to contemplate Nature’s sunrise before gazing at the midday light of divinity that blazes in angelic space: this region of absolute purity was the goal of Abraham’s travels (34). When a fallen soul has healed its injuries with ethical and dialectical remedies off ered by Raphael, it ­will be strong enough to move through Nature with Gabriel t­ oward Michael’s theology (35). This “path to happiness” starts with “memorials of the Chaldeans” and ends with angels, who already have the wings that h ­ umans need. The Chaldean Oracles, a collection of fragments attributed to Zoroaster, is the text that Pico now seems to highlight. He says that the prophet told his disciples to “drench” their wings with ­water in order to tend them. But the only liquid in the Latin Oracles known to Pico depends on noetic fire, and the ­water in one fragment of the Greek text is no more nourishing than any other ele­ment. Stronger ­waters flow from four rivers described but not named in one of Pico’s ­theses: T1K11 ​They say that out of Eden comes a r iver that divides into four headwaters, meaning that out of the second Numeration comes the third that divides into the fourth, fifth, sixth, and tenth.

The names of Eden’s rivers in the Vulgate are Phison, Geon, Tigris and Eufrates, and in Pico’s speech two of their dif­fer­ent names are not Hebrew but Syriac or Aramaic, which was thought to be the Chaldean language, but written in Ethiopic script: “The name of the one that comes from the north is ቄሥተ, which means ‘righ­teous’; the one that comes from the west is ኩጰሮነ, which signifies ‘atonement’; from the east comes ነሆራ, indicating ‘light’; and from the south comes ራሓማኗተ, which we can translate as ‘piety.’ ” In Hebrew and Aramaic, the words are qeshot, kafron, nehora, and rahamanut. In the biblical text, “a river comes from Eden to ­water the garden, and from ­there (sham) it divides and becomes four branches.” B ­ ecause the consonants of sham (‘­there’) also spell ‘Name’ (shem), Abulafia was reminded of the transcendent Name, “which is not a Numeration but definitely numbers the Numerations.” The Godhead itself is not a Sefirah, in other words, yet it produces all the Sefirot, “planting the tree from its root up to its fruit. And Paradise gives evidence of this fact b ­ ecause it is the site of all the plants.” But where the Latin text translated by Flavius has paradisus—­pardes in Hebrew—­



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Abulafia had written gan for ‘garden.’ The code sent to Pico’s audience through his translator was p-­r-­d-­s, an acronym for four levels of biblical interpretation: peshat (literal), remez (allegorical or philosophical), derash (homiletic), and sod (secret), which gave plenty of room to navigate the rivers of Eden.41 Other books of Kabbalah translated for the prince turned the topography of Paradise into theosophy, seeing S2 as Eden itself, the river flowing out of it as S3, and its four branches as S4, S5, S6, and S10. Blessings from above S4 flow down through the male S6 before plunging lower into the female S10, the Shekinah or Dwelling or Presence of God. Once the Shekinah wanders below the other Sefirot ­toward exile, “­here begins the world of separate beings, while up to this point every­thing was united. . . . ​The four camps of the Shekinah . . . ​are indicated by the names of the rivers.” By analogy: walnuts divide into four sections, and the “nut garden” of the Song of Songs in the Zohar “emerges from Eden, and this is the Shekinah. Nut: this is the holy, supernal chariot of four head rivers that went out from the garden.” The four rivers are also angels—­Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Uriel.42 Pico lays his curriculum out yet again by interpreting the statement that he attributed to Zoroaster: western w ­ aters wash the soul’s eyes with ethics before dialectic aligns its vision from the north so that it can catch Nature’s light dawning in the east and preparing it for the midday brilliance of theology in the south. The meta­phors are temporal as well as spatial, reminding Pico of the Psalmist’s prayer at morning, noon and eve­ning, which Augustine interpreted as angelic knowledge that penetrates time’s barriers. “The mid-­day light”—­the nondiscursive cognition of bodiless spirits—­ “shines directly on the Seraphim to set them on fire and . . . ​light up the Cherubim.” 43 The symbolism of cardinal directions is murkier—no surprise since Kabbalists mapped the Sefirot in theosophical, not geo­graph­i­cal space. The West is S10, the exiled Shekinah, who needs to be rescued by ethical cleansing. S6 above her is often the East, where Jacob climbs a phallic ladder on rungs of the mutable Nature studied by philosophy. Overseeing Jacob from the North is Isaac at S5, who is also Gabriel in charge of dialectic, “a straight-­edge” whose rigorous arguments are less penetrating than the ­simple intuitions of theology, the realm of Abraham and Michael at S4 in the South. Antagonism between the just Isaac at S5 on the left and merciful Abraham on the right at S4 energizes sefirotic theodicy. Three of Pico’s

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t­ heses describe the patriarch ­going south, where “old ­Father Abraham was always heading.” T1K14 ​One who knows the southern Attribute in the group on the right ­will know why e­ very journey of Abraham always goes to the South. T2K37 ​One who understands the subordination of Piety to Wisdom in the group on the right w ­ ill understand perfectly through a method of Kabbalah how Abraham in his Day saw the Day of Christ through a straight line and rejoiced. T2K42 ​From princi­ples of Kabbalah one knows how correct Jesus was to say before Abraham was born I am.44

Abraham enters the Bible story as Abram, one of Terah’s ­family (also Job’s ancestors) who left Ur of the Chaldees (also Zoroaster’s country) for Canaan by way of Harran (also Jacob’s destination when he dreamed of the ladder). ­There Abram heard God’s promise of a covenant and his command to travel again. “Old F ­ ather Abraham,” as Pico called him, was “seventy-­five when he left Harran . . . ​and went into the land of Canaan. . . . ​And crossing over a mountain east of Beth-­El, he pitched his tent ­there, with Beth-­El to the west and Ai to the east. Th ­ ere he also built an altar to the Lord and called on his name. Then Abram moved on, ­going farther to the south.” 45 Details of geography missing from Pico’s sketch of Eden’s rivers emerge from Abram’s biblical itinerary, though not clearly. In Joseph Gikatilla’s Kabbalist account, all the world’s rivers and streams had been blocked and polluted by the deluge that Noah survived. Even the channels flowing down to the Shekinah w ­ ere ­stopped up u ­ ntil Abram “crossed to Beth-­El over a mountain from the east—in Hebrew, from Kedem—­which means that he drew the channels out of Kedem to Beth-­El inasmuch as he drew through one channel on the right called Piety, and therefore all the journeys of Abraham ­were on the right, and this is the secret of the text, and Abraham journeyed on, traveling and moving south.” When Abram left Harran and traveled t­ oward Beth-­El or God’s House, he kept g­ oing right—­ according to Gikatilla—­which on the theosophical grid is the kinder side of the Sefirot. Abraham’s usual place t­ here is on the right with Love, the fourth Sefirah, which is also Piety, Pico’s ‘Chaldean’ name for the river flowing south in Eden. The Bible says that a­ fter Abram built his altar between Beth-­El and Ai, he “journeyed on, traveling and moving south.” By h eading south, he



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Figure 19. ​Abraham travels south.

climbed the rungs of the sefirotic ladder (Figure 19). But if his geo­graph­i­cal destination was north in Canaan, south was the wrong route. Facing this prob­lem, the commentator Rashi explained that south was Abram’s final destination though not always his direction of travel. For biblical exposition, Rashi’s authority was supreme, but he was not a Kabbalist, and the Zohar told a dif­fer­ent story about “the depths to which Abraham descended, knowing them but not clinging, . . . ​and returning to . . . ​the South, the supernal rung to which he had been linked before.” S2, S4, and S7 are the Sefirot on the right; S3, S5, and S8 are on the left. ­After the covenant, Abraham is S4, Isaac is S5, and Jacob stands between them at S6. But S4 is also the South, and Abram’s ­earlier voyage—­before God changed his name—­was an ascent from S10, where the Shekinah touches the lower world, t­ oward S4, the heights of Piety and Love. Wisdom at S2 was the patriarch’s ultimate goal, and his route ran through S4 in the South. Climbing as high as he could, Abram kept Beth-­El, which is God’s

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House and the Shekinah at S10, to his west, while keeping Ai at S6 to his east. In theosophical space he moved ­toward the South—­also upward on the sefirotic map—­from the depths of S10 by passing near S6 while traveling t­ oward S4 and avoiding S5, the northern region of Isaac or Judgment.46 Theology was at the top of Pico’s curriculum, and Abraham was an ancestor of theologians. From his vantage point at S4, “in his Day he saw the Day of Christ through a straight line and rejoiced”—­according to thesis T2K37. A ‘Day’ is a Sefirah, Abraham’s Day is S4, and by Pico’s reckoning the Day of Christ—­the second person of the Trinity—­was S2. In fact, Jesus himself said in John’s Gospel that “Abraham rejoiced to see my day,” and thesis T2K42 confirms a r elated statement—­“ before Abraham was born I am”—­with Christianized Kabbalah. The sefirotic clue is that S2 stands directly above S4: hence, Jesus precedes Abraham, who from his lower place looks up “through a s traight line” to see Christ’s Wisdom at S2. Abraham rejoices at the Son of God enthroned ­there with the ­Father’s Crown and the Holy Spirit’s Understanding. Just as the Crown is S1 and Understanding is S3, S2 is usually Wisdom. But another name for S2 is the Beginning (Reshit), a secret that Pico discovered in the same Gospel scene and concluded that “any Kabbalist must grant that Jesus, when asked who he was, gave exactly the right answer, saying I who speak to you am the Beginning”—­according to thesis T2K39.47 If any of Pico’s Christian contemporaries wanted to follow Abraham’s journeys to this Trinity, the Conclusions would have revealed more than the Oration, though neither made the path clear. The speech piles one riddle on another, warning about a “swift fall from heaven” to earthbound sickness and death. Another puzzle concerns “our man” again, recalling Paul’s admonition that ­human ills are both inner and outer. The archangel Raphael w ­ ill heal mortals with ethics and dialectic. Gabriel ­will help them find God’s strength in nature and prepare them to accept the “priesthood of theology” from Michael. Before salvation comes, however, while the soul’s wings are still lost, the spirit ­will have collapsed into its body, whose major organs—­brain, heart, and liver—­will suff er the trauma. If the sefirotic tree is re­imagined as a s upercelestial Man, S2–­S3 is the brain, whence blessings flow down to S6, the heart, and then to S10, the liver. From this lower region come appetitive and irascible passions, aroused when vice enters through the body’s senses, as Jerome taught: “The entry-­ way of vices to the soul is through the five senses, as if they w ­ ere win­dows



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of some sort; . . . ​if a p erson delights in . . . ​shapely ­women and splendid jewelry, precious metal and clothing, . . . ​the soul’s freedom is taken captive through the win­dows of the eyes, fulfilling the prophet’s words, death has come in.” Jerome alluded to a lament by Jeremiah, and Pico noticed: Death has come in by our win­dows and entered our h ­ ouses to destroy the ­little ones in the marketplace and the young ones in the streets. Speak, this is the word of the Lord: ­human death falls like dung on the face of the land, like straw ­behind the reaper, and no one to gather it in.

But archangels are ­there to help sinners drag themselves from the muck with powers signified by theophoric names. Raphael—­‘God’s healing’—­ protects Tobias by having him gut a fish and save the gall, heart and liver. The gall cures a malady of the head: the blindness of Tobit, the f­ ather of Tobias. Smoke from the fish’s heart and liver “drives out e­ very kind of demon”—­like Asmodeus, the evil spirit of the Book of Tobit. Raphael’s place among the Sefirot is the lowest, at S10, where he dispenses medicines of ethics and dialectic. Higher at S5 is Gabriel—­‘God’s strength’—­teaching natu­ral philosophy to show “God’s might and power all around.” Nature is nothing without divinity, however, so the science taught by Gabriel at S5 ­will be surpassed by Michael’s theology at S4.48 Pico has already shown how God ­settles the conflict between Michael (‘God’s likeness’ or perhaps ‘power’) and Gabriel: h ­ umans can also make peace and rise above S5 and S4 through the higher angelic choirs. The very first of Pico’s Kabbalist t­ heses (T1K1) introduces Michael, stationed below ­these loftier spirits but a high priest nonetheless. The purpose of his priesthood is for saints to be sacrificed by a good death of the kiss. As the goal of mystical ascent, this immolation is a holy prayer. Souls to be saved must rise through the place where Abraham presides and where Michael “sacrifices the souls of the just.” In theosophical space, the place is S4, just beneath the supreme triad where annihilation in the Godhead waits. Climbing up to this altar of sacrifice is arduous and perilous—­the trip to Abraham’s realm and Michael’s “where unclean spirits have no place,”

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as Pico says, b ­ ecause Lucifer’s angelic foe stands guard t­ here against demons. The prince believed that even Muslims understood the holiness of this place, whose model on earth was their Kaaba, built by Abraham on a dif­fer­ent voyage when he traveled to Mecca with Ishmael. The patriarch’s partner at S4 is the archangel who vanquished his fallen brethren before the dawn of h ­ uman time and who w ­ ill preside on the final Day of Judgment, sorting the saved from the damned as he once fought Satan for the soul of Moses and battled Samael, the Angel of Death. Michael, this dreadful spirit and high priest of heaven, who “­will bestow on us, ­after we have served our time in philosophy, the priesthood of theology,” is himself a Messenger of Death, but the death is benign and blessed.49

5. ​ Oration IV, 36–45 Pico was more than ready to serve his time in philosophy. Philosophy thrilled him, and advice from the ­Fathers compelled him to study it, despite abuse from critics who found it useless (36). Philosophy itself, not money or power, was his motive, but he knew that some found his proj­ect off ensive (37–38). Some complained about public disputation itself, o ­ thers about himself as a disputant: he was too young, the prob­lems he chose ­were too hard and too many for him, and Rome was the wrong place for such a spectacle (39). He resented the charges as merely envious and felt compelled to rebut them, showing first that phi­los­o­phers had always disputed in order to improve their minds (40–41). Although modesty tempered his self-­defense, he saw his own weakness as no reason to avoid a contest in which losers win (42–43). As for debating too many ­theses, the burden was his alone, and if some of his claims proved true, why assume that ­others ­were false just b ­ ecause ­there ­were many of them? In fact, the number was exactly right for the issues at hand (44–45). He pointed to his seven expositions of the Cherubic life as reasons “that have not just excited me to study philosophy but have forced me to it.” Philosophy was necessary ­because theology required it. Once the life of angels had been chosen, philosophy was an obligation, forcing the prince to refute critics who attacked his pledge to study it. Of the first witnesses he named, Plato and Aristotle w ­ ere phi­los­o­phers, but Gorgias was a sophist and a rhetorician, and Cicero—­l ike Pico himself—­ defended philosophy with an orator’s weapons. Despite the rhetorical turns in this part of the Oration, the pre­sen­ta­t ion is simpler and more



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straightforward than what had already been said and less arcane than what would be said next. 50 Pico planned to give the speech early in 1487, “­after Epiphany” according to a notice at the end of the Conclusions. This was the day when Magi brought costly gifts to the Christ child, just as the speaker had precious secrets to bestow on the Church. He had his t­ heses printed in the previous December, and the outcry from Rome was swift: the pope announced his opposition before the end of February—­the month of Pico’s birthday. Ficino, Poliziano, and ­others ­will have known what their friend was up to, more or less, even without making much sense of it. But t­ hose best able to understand his proj­ect ­were Flavius and other Jews who helped him with Kabbalah—­especially Flavius, a convert who had worked at the Vatican. He and Pico made each other miserable: to inflict another wound, maybe Flavius let friends in Rome know about his employer’s dangerous ideas. Or maybe the Roman printer, Eucharius Silber, was frightened by the text delivered to him.51 In March 1487, when thirteen t­ heses ­were condemned, one about magic (M) and Kabbalah was certainly shocking: T2M9 ​­There is no knowledge that gives us more certainty of Christ’s divinity than magic and Kabbalah.

To defend this provocation in the Apology, Pico turned to sophistry, exploiting a rule of logic about statements of the form ‘if ­either p or q or r, then d’—­a disjunctive hy­po­thet­i­cal. The antecedent (the if-­clause) contains several categorical statements disjoined by conjunctions, ‘­either’ and ‘or,’ so that the consequent d is true if any one disjunct (p, q, r) is true even when ­others are false. In that case, the ­whole hy­po­thet­i­cal holds up. Restating T2M9 as a disjunctive hy­po­thet­i­cal, Pico turned an undeniable assertion of Christ’s divinity into a disjunct of the antecedent, thereby rescuing the thesis as a ­whole. Clever and correct but evasive: this would have been a fair response to the prince’s cagey response by an audience that had as much elementary logic as he did. As for magic and Kabbalah, he knew what he was up against, but he underrated his opponents and spoke rashly. The Apology that he felt obliged to write—­and wrote in a r ush—­mocked the Roman prelates for understanding nothing at all about Kabbalah, not even the word. His charge was true enough, but putting it in print was not wise. He also realized that many learned Christians feared magic as the dev­il’s tool: this was why he

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took care to distinguish demonic from natu­ral magic ­later in the Oration. In 1484 Innocent VIII, the pope who condemned his ­theses in 1487, had written an endorsement of witchcraft t­ rials that was printed with the Hammer of Witches in 1486.52 In this climate, Pico’s be­hav­ior was reckless. The knowledge deemed less certain than magic and Kabbalah by his preposterous thesis T2M9 was natu­ral theology, and Rome was full of theologians. The Vatican employed ­these power­ful clerics. Even intellectuals had to eat, but the wealthy prince scorned them ­because they “planned their ­whole lives for advantage and ambition”—­a cheap target for an aristocrat with plenty of money, so young and so full of himself. Born in February 1463, he would be “barely twenty-­four years of age” when the time came for him to address the Roman prelates in 1487. He would die just a few years ­later—­a few months before his thirty-­second birthday, in November of 1494. Mozart was thirty-­six when he died. Marlowe had not turned thirty when he was stabbed. Galois was killed in a duel at twenty. Like them, Pico was a prodigy, and he knew it. He had no qualms about debating theological mysteries in the capital of Christendom. “If I say that I’m fit,” he sighed, “I may seem given to immodesty and self-­regard, but if I c oncede that I’m not fit, I’ll appear thoughtless and reckless. See what a bind I find myself in!” So he consulted Paul and Job once again. Job’s adviser Elihu, also sensitive about his youth, at first declined to counsel that long-­suff ering man. Then he realized that “it’s not the elders who are sages,” since understanding comes to any h ­ uman in whom God’s spirit breathes. The Zohar cited Elihu to show that the young can be wise in the Torah. And Paul warned Timothy not to be shy about his age, urging him “to be an example to the faithful.” So Pico heeded Job’s saying about “the spirit in men” and Paul’s advice to Timothy: “Let no one despise your youth.” With their encouragement, he proposed a “disputation on sublime mysteries of Christian theology . . . ​in the most populous of all cities, before the grandest gathering of the most learned p ­ eople, in the Apostolic Senate.” He planned to address the College of Cardinals, their associates and other learned Romans—­the “Most Reverend ­Fathers” saluted a dozen times in his speech.53 “I have no fear of fighting so hard a ­battle against the strongest and swiftest,” he boasted. What made him so confident? Attacks on his character forced the prince to talk about himself, and not without exaggeration.



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He claimed to have “put aside all concern for private or public aff airs,” for example. But Pico’s nephew dated his u ­ ncle’s withdrawal from the world “three years before he died,” not in 1486 when he wrote the Oration ­after bungling an elopement. “­There is nothing ­grand or special about me,” he protested, allowing that he was “studious and fond of the liberal arts” though a “weak soldier” and not “unaware of my weakness.” Even so, he thought himself all the stronger for appreciating that in a contest of ideas “one wins by being beaten.” The loser learns by losing and “goes home the richer, knowing more.” If the prince could not r­ eally lose, what would he have to fear? He was fearless, but not foolhardy—so he said.54 It was his Christian duty, he concluded, to defend the value of a disputation that required one so young to discuss so much. Scripture taught him to speak truth to power, but was disputing the right way to speak? Dismissing t­ hose who “misrepresent this custom of disputing in public,” Pico ignored them b ­ ecause of their ignorance. If disputing does any harm, he told the cardinals, the blame “is not only all of yours to share with me, . . . ​ but also Plato’s and Aristotle’s along with the most acclaimed phi­los­o­phers of e­ very age.” Like all educated clergy, the reverend F ­ athers had learned their lessons by disputing, following the example of ancient sages—as Pico also hoped to do, proposing hundreds of ­theses for debate and stating them as propositions in a (more or less) conventional scholastic format: the stilus Parisiensis or Pa­ri­sian method. Gianfrancesco Pico called Giovanni “a very skilled debater: when his mind was on the boil, he worked constantly on intellectual competitions and spent heavi­ly on them.” The nephew praised his u ­ ncle’s mastery of “Pa­ri­sian” learning and associated it with Aquinas. But formal disputation was not a Thomist specialty. Debate had been a teaching method for every­ one in universities since the thirteenth ­century. Had Pico succeeded in his extravagant plan, the Roman disputation would have been ‘quodlibetal’—­a quolibet, de quolibet, ‘by anyone, about anything’—­like the miscellany printed in the Conclusions, though most debaters ­were less ambitious and less brilliant.55 We can only guess what Pico was hoping for. At Padua, Paris and other universities, he would have attended disputations and would have read quodlibets composed by masters like Henry of Ghent—­featured in his Conclusions. He would have studied the formalized rules of disputation called ‘obligations.’ And Rome would have appealed to him as the holiest site of debate about Catholic doctrine. If his fantasies w ­ ere grandiose (not

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unlikely), he might have i­ magined scenes surpassing what Raphael would paint for the pope’s library in the Vatican around 1510. One fresco, usually called the Disputà, glorifies the Eucharist, the subject of three of Pico’s condemned conclusions. On the wall opposite, in the School of Athens, phi­los­o­phers seek concord by weighing Plato’s teachings against Aristotle’s. The bottom register of the Disputà sanctifies such deliberations—­ popes, cardinals, bishops, monks, and ancient Christian sages quizzing each other about the metaphysics of transubstantiation.56 Like ­those holy men, “acclaimed phi­los­o­phers of ­every age” had confirmed the value of “constant practice at disputation,” which is a “gymnasium of ideas”—as Pico wrote—­for putting muscle on the mind. This is why “poets keep singing about the arms of Pallas,” why the rabbis say that the “iron of sages ‫ברזל שלחכמים‬, is their symbol,” and why “Chaldeans also find it desirable, in the geniture of one who is to be a p hi­los­o­pher, that Mars should look on Mercury in trine aspect.” With scripture, tradition, and experience on his side, Pico went to poetic theology, Talmud, and astrology for additional support. “Why are contentious discussions good exercise?” Aristotle’s question was answered by the Bible and Talmud. “If the iron is blunt,” says the Preacher, “it ­will be sharpened with much ­labor, and wisdom ­will follow eff ort.” And in Proverbs, “as iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the wit of his friend,” meaning—­according to the rabbis—­that “just as in the case of one iron sharpening another, so do two sages sharpen each other.” Talmudists ­were hakhmim or ‘sages’ armed with Athena’s ­mental weapons—­ wearing the “breastplate of Pallas,” in Vergil’s words. “Chaldeans” in this case w ­ ere astrologers, not the prophets of the Oracles. In the horoscope that Pico described, the clanging iron of Mars was a mismatch for Mercury’s quicksilver, but another astrologer, Firmicus Maternus, gave him reason to see the clash as propitious for phi­los­o­phers: “By day Mercury . . . ​ produces phi­los­o­phers, teachers of grammar or geometers, . . . ​experts in sacred letters, . . . ​orators and ­lawyers. . . . ​But if Mars is in trine aspect with Mercury in this position, . . . ​and both are situated in favorable parts of the geniture, . . . ​they produce sages . . . ​able to explain themselves, . . . ​ sharp, good at reasoning and calculating or dealing with literary tasks.” Astrologers, Talmud scholars, and poetic prophets approved of disputation, affirming that such contests are useful, honorable, and necessary.57 ­After showing why disputation was needed and respectable and that he was fit to dispute, Pico still had to refute critics who ­were off ended by the



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“vast number” of his propositions. Ancient phi­los­o­phers and poets said he should dare and dare again, but prudence compelled him to weigh the consequences. “If I succeed,” he reasoned, “I ­don’t see why what earns praise in ten questions should deserve blame even in 900.” A very large number of propositions—in itself—­detracted nothing from the merits of his proj­ect. He needed hundreds of t­ heses from scores of authorities to ratify the peace advocated by his speech, a theological peace “among the Lord’s exalted” that was not yet achieved by the philosophy that preceded it. Other debaters in his time “imitated Gorgias of Leontini and have been praised for it,” he noted, and they disputed “not just on 900 questions but on all questions in all the arts.” Then why should he not debate “topics that are many, yes, but a ­limited number on specific points?” Setting his limit high at 900, he still claimed to be more restrained than the Sophist Gorgias, whom Cicero described as pandering to anyone who could come up with a question, no m ­ atter the topic. Gianfrancesco recalled that when his ­uncle was still “young and lusting for glory, . . . ​he chased ­after fame like Gorgias . . . ​by defending any and all sides.”58

6. ​ Oration IV, 46–55 Pico’s program was large ­because of its goal and method: to know ­every school of philosophy while defending no one’s dogma (46). Christian, Muslim, and Greek thinkers all had admirable qualities (47–48). Even sects that attacked the truth made it stronger (49). This abundance of wisdom encouraged the prince to learn from all the schools, both barbarian and Greek, Arab as well as Latin, Aristotelians along with Platonists: he claimed to be the first to dispute Platonism in public (50). Inspired by ancient theologies, he also had something of his own to contribute (51–52). First, he would prove that Plato’s ideas agree with Aristotle’s, and he would also show that Christian thinkers only appear to conflict with each other and with Muslims (53). Th ­ ese harmonious insights led him to astonishing discoveries in natu­ral philosophy, metaphysics, and the divine philosophy of numbers (54–55). At first sight the proj­ect looks eclectic: Pico “picked out what truly suits him” ­after reading all the phi­los­o­phers. He disclaimed sectarian commitments and deplored the fragmentation of philosophy—­a ll the “squabbles and scraps.” Nonetheless, he arranged his t­ heses by “nations and heads of

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sects, though without distinction for parts of philosophy.” Parts of philosophy are metaphysics, natu­ral philosophy, ethics, logic, and so on—­like the divisions of Aristotle’s works. The prince bypassed this familiar taxonomy to or­ga­nize his propositions by schools and masters whose conflicts he wanted to bring to an end in philosophical peace. Some schools of the l­ater M ­ iddle Ages w ­ ere named for a g­ reat master, like ‘Thomists’ for Aquinas or ‘Scotists’ for Duns Scotus. Other labels ­were impersonal, like the ‘old way’ and ‘modern way’: via antiqua for realist doctrines of universals, via moderna for the nominalist opposition. Ancient philosophy was also sectarian and often dogmatic, despite Pico’s illusions. “All the ancients followed this rule,” he maintained, “to skip no works without reading them as they examined writers of e­ very kind”—­ which was why Plato called Aristotle a “reader.” The source of this anecdote was a biographer who thought that Aristotle was too inquisitive to be partisan. Yet Pico recognized “something distinct about each and e­ very group,” the Acad­emy, Lyceum, Porch and so on. Fights among recent Christian thinkers, however, not t­ hose ­battles of long ago, ­were the trou­ bles that prompted him to seek peace. “Let me start ­here with our own ­people,” he wrote, “at the point where philosophy has fi­nally arrived.”59 By the 1480s, when Pico declared himself a phi­los­o­pher, Italian philosophy had acquired its own contentious modernism from northern Europe—­ from Oxford in par­tic­u­lar. In 1485 the prince debated the special character of philosophical language with Ermolao Barbaro—­ten years older and a talented translator of Greek philosophy—­and Barbaro jeered with his own name at “modern barbarian phi­los­o­phers,” calling them “enemies of eloquence.” The ­really serious issue was Latinity, he implied, suggesting that diction, grammar, and syntax would solve any philosophical prob­lems that might come up. Pico’s nephew took a similar line in his Life by highlighting his ­uncle’s dislike for Suiseticae quisquiliae—­“swill for the Pig-­ Headed called ‘calculations.’ ” The target of this cheap shot was the novel teaching—­novel from the perspective of a Quattrocento Italian—of Richard and Roger Swynshead, William Heytesbury, and the other ‘Calculators’ of Oxford’s Merton College. By treating his ­uncle’s dislike for their method as aesthetic, Gianfrancesco distorted Giovanni’s position. When the Merton professors investigated the “intension and remission of forms,” the forms they studied might be a priest’s piety or the black of his robe: by intension, the color and the virtue could both become stronger, by remission weaker. The Calculators



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wanted to mea­sure such changes with arithmetic and geometry. But Pico objected, declaring that “moderns who use mathe­matics to discuss natu­ral prob­lems have destroyed the foundations of natu­ral philosophy.” However, he made this statement in a long section (85 t­ heses) of the Conclusions “on mathe­matics,” which lists 74 “questions that he promises to answer with numbers.” Clearly, he did not want to exclude mathe­matics from philosophy—­only to replace Oxford inventions with his own mathematical novelties, displayed at length in the Conclusions. He placed propositions to challenge vari­ous ele­ments of the Merton theory throughout his pamphlet, where medieval teachings are everywhere.60 Pico attached his first sets of t­ heses—in the T1 propositions, the first ­ reat, group of 400 in the Conclusions—to six medieval figures: Albert the G Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Meyronnes, John Duns Scotus, Henry of Ghent, and Giles of Rome. He listed the same “Latin phi­los­o­phers and theologians” in the Oration but not in the same order. Albert, Thomas, and Scotus ­were universally famous, the ­others well known to theologians and phi­los­o­phers. All wrote before 1328, and all except Henry commented on Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Henry was a secular master who followed Augustine and Avicenna as well as Aristotle; Giles was a Thomist but not doctrinaire; Francis was a partisan Scotist. Pico’s nephew claimed that Aquinas was his ­uncle’s clear favorite, which is not what the Apology suggests. Many more scholastic experts and their controversies are vis­i­ble in the Apology than the six names shown in the Oration and Conclusions. Con­temporary debates about theology—­late medieval debates, in other words—­were the prince’s philosophical heartland. His knowledge of the relevant prob­lems was remarkable, even though he took some information second­hand from anthologies and from digests by specialists. Theology interested him as much as the arts curriculum, and angelology— a part of theology—­was one link with Giles of Rome. He and Pico w ­ ere both curious about angels, demons, and their roles in magic. The thorny question of ­future contingents arises, according to Giles, “­because of evil angels and Merlin, for they say that Merlin was born with a demon’s help—­ like the magic of succubi and incubi—­and that Merlin spoke about many ­future contingents which many think the Devil taught him.” Three of Pico’s eleven ­t heses on Giles (1G5–7) discuss angels—­including evil angels. But all scholastic phi­los­o­phers and theologians dealt with angels, demons, and other topics bearing on magic ­because they ­were built into

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the university curriculum and its textbooks. ­There was nothing special about Giles in this regard. In fact, Albert and Thomas had more to say about magic. Just to defend the first thesis condemned in 1487, the prince named more than two dozen post-­Patristic Christians, relying heavi­ly on some of them. The oldest was Anselm of Canterbury, born around 1033; Jean Cabrol (Capreolus), the most recent, died in 1444. Capreolus was a doctrinaire Thomist, but other traditions are just as vis­i­ble in the Apology, including “Scotists” and “nominalists.” But Pico’s longest quotation in defense of his first thesis came from Durand de Saint-­Pourçain (d. 1334), an unconventional Dominican who survived controversy and became a bishop: Durand’s contentious views ­were never declared heretical, so why should Rome treat Pico diff erently? To sum up his case, the prince closed this first part of the Apology with references to William of Ockham and Robert Holcot, an early follower of Ockham—­not to endorse their theology but to demand equal treatment from his prosecutors. Why Pico’s speech headlined just the six scholastics named ­there is unclear. What statement was he making by putting two Dominicans (Albert and Thomas) and two Franciscans (Scotus and Francis) alongside one Augustinian (Giles) and a secular theologian (Henry)? Defending such choices at the end of the Apology, he claimed that a “hidden (occultus) linkage in all my conclusions” made his se­lections coherent. Such linkages are detectable in the Conclusions: a thesis about Plotinus (T1Plo7), for example, depends on three previous but not adjacent ­theses about Averroes (T1Avr2–4). The connection is s­ ilent at both ends, hence cryptic, even though the point is a l arge one: that ­human salvation is absorption within the divine. A more obvious motive for citing Scotists along with Thomists was to promote the prince’s theory of concord: no thought should be excluded by its pedigree. Another reason was the orator’s youth: at the time he wrote the Oration to introduce the Conclusions, his richest experience of philosophy—in Paris—­was still fresh. Not to put all his learning on display needed more tact than he could muster in his early twenties. ­After the six Latin scholastics, Pico named another group of t­ heses for eight “Arabs who generally declare themselves Peripatetics,” but the speech mentions only the better-­k nown: Averroes, Avicenna, Alfarabi, and Avempace—­Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sina, al-­Farabi, and Ibn Bajja. The next ­theses went to “Greeks who declare the Peripatetic view.” All five are named in



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the Oration: Theophrastus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Ammonius, and Simplicius—­though again in a dif­fer­ent order. This Ammonius was a P latonist commentator on Aristotle, two centuries l­ater than the Ammonius (Plutarch’s teacher) already mentioned in the speech—­though Pico may not have noticed the diff erence.61 Like all the ­theses in T1, t­ hese propositions are described as ‘regarding’ (secundum) the views of the thinkers named. They ­were not original with Pico or endorsed by him: the conventions of scholastic disputation did not make a d isputant personally responsible for debating points. The heated disclaimer that closes the Apology goes farther, however, starting with statements by the notoriously unorthodox Origen but including many other propositions which at first blush may contain something to off end ears unlearned yet godly. . . . ​I would want none of our ­people to read t­ hese propositions raw, so to speak. . . . ​Therefore, by the bowels of our Lord Jesus Christ, . . . ​I beg and plead with friends and enemies, godly and ungodly, expert and lay, to read without spite and malevolence what I am now writing but not to read what preceded it—­t he same propositions uninterpreted and unexplained—­because I proposed them to be debated by experts and did not publish them for casual reading by all comers. . . . ​But anyone who reads . . . ​t he ­t heses intended for debate can tell . . . ​which propositions claim to express a view of mine, as distinct from o ­ thers that express someone ­else’s view. . . . ​For ­t hose who hate me, then, a reason not to read the conclusions is that they are mine. For ­t hose who love me, a reason not to read them is that, from ­t hose that are mine, they might think up many o ­ thers that are not mine.

Even so, although he disclaimed his own Conclusions, Pico had grouped all ­ nder a heading that distinguished them from the T1 ­theses his T2 ­theses u as “following my own opinion,” and some of the T2 propositions are emphatic first-­person statements, including five about Kabbalah: T2K1, 2, 28, 48, and 68. Since Kabbalah was the subject of a condemned and egregiously provocative thesis (T2M9), Pico’s plea for academic neutrality had been undermined where he badly needed it.62 In T1, Plato and Aristotle are represented mainly by their disciples, interpreters, and opponents. In the Oration, Pico’s descriptions of ­these critics and advocates are rich in rhe­toric but light on philosophy: “lively and discerning, . . . ​solid and balanced, . . . ​clean and precise, . . . ​shrewd and sharp, . . . ​opulent and abundant, . . . ​elegant and parsimonious.” Was

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he thinking about literary style (not likely for Arabic texts in crude Latin translations) or philosophical style or both? Cicero had used such phrases to praise ancient orators.63 Of five “phi­los­o­phers called Platonists” in T1, the speech omits only Adelandus Arabs—­perhaps Adelard of Bath, a twelfth-­century En­glishman who made contact with Muslims. The ­others, listed by T1 in their order as Platonic successors, are Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus. Although the Oration names Proclus only once, his presence in the speech is large, as in the Conclusions, where no single authority gets more t­ heses in T1 than his 55. His metaphysics of divine triads was crucial for Pico’s most daring innovation, deriving the Christian doctrine of the Trinity from Kabbalah. Only nine ­theses are listed for Iamblichus, mainly concerning his book On Mysteries of Egypt, which Ficino owned but had not yet published in translation: the prince once asked to borrow Marsilio’s Iamblichus. The speech names this phi­los­o­pher only twice, once to emphasize his knowledge of Orpheus and Pythagoras. Pico’s Pythagorean sayings all came from his Protrepticus, which is also a key to the structure of the speech, and he knew ἀ e Pythagorean Life as well. The speech also names Hermias, Damascius, and Olympiodorus, but their presence in the Conclusions is small to none. Descriptions of Platonists in the Oration are less formulaic, though no less vacuous, than epithets for scholastics, Muslims, and Greek commentators: “rich content and a complex piety,” “a more secret philosophy,” “altogether amazing.” Proclus, though slighted by the speech, abounds in “Asiatic fecundity.” ­After his dozens of ­theses in the Conclusions, the next three sets of propositions give less attention to the “mathe­matics of Pythagoras,” a “belief of Chaldean theologians,” and the “ancient teaching of Mercurius Trismegistus”—­before the final propositions of T1 on the “secret teaching of Hebrew Kabbalist sages.” The conclusions that follow in T2 are arranged topically or assigned to groups of thinkers or texts, not just to single individuals. Plato, Aristotle, and Zoroaster are prominent, however, along with ­ auses, the Orphic Hymns, the Chaldean Oracles, and treatises the Book of C on Kabbalah.64 ­Every school had lessons to teach. Even if a sect “mocks well-­meant thoughts with slander, this makes truth stronger,” and Pico was e­ ager to try e­ very approach. He wanted “to put ideas of all sorts into play.” Only then might illumination come in a “flash.” The deepest truths, according to



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Plato, arise from sudden intuitions: eluding all language, such insights could not be captured in writing. A sentence inspired by Seneca, missing from the printed Oration but preserved in a manuscript, conveys the force of Pico’s doubts: “­there never was nor w ­ ill be a­ fter us anyone to whom truth might give itself to be fully grasped: greater its immensity than what mankind’s capacity can equal.” No written words could bear the weight of truth, and yet the prince hoped to “examine e­ very scrap of paper.” 65 One side of this program, aiming to see all the evidence, was in line with the eclectic ideology that Brucker—­a harsh critic of Pico—­would promote in the Enlightenment. But another side of the proj­ect, relying on momentary insights and superhuman intuitions, was a f atal failing, by Brucker’s lights, that turned him and other eclectics against the prince. Another such m ­ istake, built deeper into Pico’s plans, was to treat concord as a philosophical ideal rather than purging it as truth-­k illing syncretism. Brucker saw the miscegenation as all the more despicable ­because Pico defiled not just Greek reason but also Christian faith with “Oriental and Platonic lunacy.” “If we dealt only with philosophy by Latins,” Pico argued, “what good would it do, seeing that all wisdom came from barbarians to Greeks and from Greeks to us?” This tale of barbarian origins was actually Christian propaganda—­unknown to the prince—­that targeted the nativism of Greek pagans: “all the vaunted learning and philosophy of the Greeks . . . ​has been collected by them from barbarians,” in the words of Eusebius. Pico’s attitude was entirely dif­fer­ent: he urged phi­los­o­phers “to stand on what strangers have found,” and he recorded the most alien wisdom known to him in Hermetic, Chaldean, and Kabbalist ­theses of T1—­most of them Kabbalist. Like Ficino, he also studied Neoplatonists who saw Aristotle’s natu­ral philosophy as anticipating Plato’s theology, the Platonism that Augustine revered as the “holiest of all philosophies.” But Pico made an untenable claim on this sacred wisdom: “now for the first time, a­ fter many centuries,” he declared, “I have brought it forward for public scrutiny through disputation.” Had Ficino seen t­ hese words before 1496, when the Oration was fi­nally printed, he should have objected—­though the prince might more plausibly have claimed priority for disputing in public about this topic.66 The next phi­los­o­pher usually relies on the last, in any event, and even borrowed wisdom enables them both “to improve what came from elsewhere.” Any lesser eff ort would be “like coming empty-­handed . . . ​to a

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banquet of sages,” Pico suggests, bringing nothing “born of one’s own talent.” Philosophy goes sterile without new insights, the fresh energies that no lethargy or deference should impede, “as if ancestral discoveries blocked the way . . . ​and Nature’s force w ­ ere spent in us.” Fearing God’s dis­plea­sure if his thoughts w ­ ere infertile, Pico proposed to add “many t­ hings that I have discovered and devised on topics natu­ral and divine.” He promised “much about the ancient theology of Mercurius Trismegistus, much from teachings of Chaldeans and Pythagoras, much from more secret mysteries of Hebrews.” Most of the indicated T1 ­theses—47 out of 78—­are about Kabbalah, however, and only ten are Hermetic, taken almost exactly in sequence from just two treatises (12 and 13) in the Latin version of the Corpus available to him—­Ficino’s Pimander.67 First and most of all, he claimed to prove—­not just assert—­“concord between Plato and Aristotle.” Such a p roof would demonstrate thesis T2Ur1, the first of “17 unusual conclusions” at the beginning of T2 that aim to reconcile, not innovate: T2Ur1 ​­There is no prob­lem of natu­ral philosophy or theology about which Aristotle and Plato do not agree in meaning and substance even though they seem to disagree in words.

­ thers—­great masters like Boethius—­had tried and failed where the O prince claimed success. He thought that John Philoponus, a monophysite Christian, wrote the Life of Aristotle where Plato called Aristotle a “reader.” The same Life says that Aristotle did not “oppose Plato, only t­ hose who have not understood what Plato says.” Looking for such harmonies beneath apparent discord, the Oration also brings Scotus in line with Thomas and Averroes closer to Avicenna, who “agree in several places where they are thought to disagree.” Nine of the first seventeen t­ heses in T2 deny conflicts between Thomist and Scotist positions; three do the same for Avicenna and Averroes. Gianfrancesco described this as his ­uncle’s unrealized proj­ect for “concord between Plato and Aristotle . . . ​, whereby the princes of philosophy would have pledged friendship for the ­f uture—­Plato, ­under a heavy cloak of myth and veils of mathe­matics, as well as Aristotle, barricaded by the senses. He would also have arranged a truce on many issues, if not universal peace, between Averroes and Avicenna, between Thomas and Scotus, though they had long been in conflict.” The speech brags about establishing a peace that “no one has managed to prove.” 68



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­Theses about concord, the first of eleven parts in T2, introduce the 500 t­ heses that Pico claimed as his own. Next comes a dif­fer­ent theme already introduced in the speech—­innovation. “I have chosen to put forward a new philosophy,” Pico declared, including “novel teachings in physics and metaphysics.” Philosophical and theological novelties are the content of the second, third and fourth sets of t­ heses in T2. Where the speech moves on to “another novel method that philosophizes with numbers,” corresponding innovations in T2 rely on Platonic arithmetic from the Timaeus ­ auses: t­ heses backing ­these invenand on metaphysics from the Book of C tions are the fifth, sixth, and seventh sets. Pico then announces “theorems about magic” for the eighth, ninth, and tenth sets; magic also takes up several pages of the Oration. T2 culminates with 72 t­ heses on Kabbalah: in combination with Orphic theology, Kabbalah is also the final topic of the speech.69 A B C D E

concord new philosophy and theology new mathe­matics magic Kabbalah

set 1 sets 2–4 sets 5–7 sets 8–10 set 11

Dividing T2 into five parts (A-­E) in this way makes a strong break between B, with three sets of ­theses on philosophy and theology, and C, whose subject is mathe­matics, also in three sets. Pico conceals a boundary in a prominent place: the first thesis of set 5  in C—on “the triadic numbers that Plato, in the Timaeus, puts in a triangle signifying the soul”—is thesis 600 of the ­whole work, an esoteric invitation to contemplate the closed mem, whose value is 600. Even where such arcane clues add up, Pico’s Christian readers could not have done the arithmetic. The mathe­matics that he prized was not the “arithmetic of commerce” disdained by Pythagoras and other sages. By Pico’s lights, the most productive use of numbers was mystical and symbolic and would answer “questions considered fundamental for divine and natu­ral knowledge.” The propositions in T2’s seventh set pre­sent such questions: many are gnomic—­“How do ele­ments exist in the heavens? ” or “What does body mean?”—­and none takes more than ten or twelve words to state. Some of the answers depend on numerology. How would Pico’s audience know the code, even if it came from merely recondite sages like Iamblichus or Proclus, much less the utterly inaccessible Kabbalists?

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A less arcane pedigree linked Pico’s numerical secrets to Plato and his Neoplatonic followers. Iamblichus described a revelation that Pythagoras got from Orpheus through Aglaophemus, showing that “number’s eternal essence is the most providential princi­ple in all heaven and earth and nature in between . . . ​, from which it is clear that Pythagoras learned from the Orphics that number defines the essence of the gods.” Tracking the descent of this arithmetical theology, Proclus invoked the ideal of concord: “Each doctrine must be shown to harmonize with Platonic princi­ples and with mystical traditions of the theologians, since all theology among the Greeks was born of Orphic mystagogy, ­after Pythagoras was first taught the rites of the gods by Aglaophemus and then Plato received complete knowledge of ­these ­matters from Pythagorean and Orphic writings. . . . ​To be sure, the Pythagorean Philolaos also recorded for us many such insights and marvels.” The story told by Iamblichus is longer, omitting Philolaos but including Damo, the d ­ aughter of Pythagoras whom the speech would praise l­ater as a vessel of secrecy.70 Although Pico cited ‘Avenzoar’ from a b ook by ‘Abumasar,’ anything reported by Abu Ma’shar, the ­great astrologer of the ninth ­century, could not—­strictly speaking—­have come from the person usually called Avenzoar, the physician Ibn Zuhr who died in the twelfth ­century. However, Abu Ma’shar’s influence was pervasive not only in astrology but also in chronography and the writing of chronicles, where fragments of his works ­were cited out of context. In its form, the utterance credited to Avenzoar—­“a person who knows numbers knows every­thing”—is like the lapidary “man is a g­ reat miracle” that opens the speech, and both may have come from Arabic gnomological lit­er­a­ture, perhaps in Latin translation. (Maybe Pico knew that Abu Ma’shar had identified the Koranic Idris not only with the biblical Enoch but also with Hermes—­connections that would have intrigued him.)71 Despite the talk about numbers, when the prince took credit in his speech for “seventy-­two novel teachings in physics and metaphysics,” the bookkeeping was sloppy: the headnote in the 1486 Conclusions has 71, confirmed by the counts of t­ hese t­ heses in the next edition of 1532. Pico reserved the number 72—­a supremely meaningful figure—­for a ­grand finale on Kabbalah, the last set in T2. In part B of T2, three ­earlier sets (2, 3, 4) deliver a “new philosophy,” first by interpreting Plato and Aristotle, Thomas and Scotus, Avicenna and Averroes in set 2; ­these authorities then retreat from set 3 as ­others advance—­including Empedocles, Parmenides,



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and Pythagoras; fewer names appear in set 4—­only Aquinas, Origen, Paul, and the John of Revelation. The ­theses of set 2 ­were not much dif­fer­ent from the “usual way of ­doing philosophy,” said Pico. ­Those in set 3 brought “new teachings into philosophy,” however, and the propositions of set 4 w ­ ere “quite dif­fer­ent from the usual way of talking about theology.” In ­these three sets of part B, he moved from familiar to unfamiliar ground before announcing his riskiest departures from conventional dogma. The Oration blurs ­these procedural distinctions by promising that “novel teachings . . . ​­will solve any prob­lem posed about nature or divinity by using a method far dif­fer­ent from the philosophy taught to us, the one read in the schools and respected by teachers in our time.” The prince’s judges in Rome would demand more re­spect, but he was oblivious to such concerns. Of the propositions that first angered the pope, nine of thirteen came from the t­ heses of set 4 that w ­ ere advertised as “quite dif­fer­ent” from traditional theology: he might just as well have painted a target on them. Disregarding custom, leaving the schools and his teachers ­behind, Pico claimed g­ reat originality and even greater power for his discoveries, including a n ew way to do magic by combining it with Kabbalah—­a mystifying novelty for almost all his Christian critics, and for some an intolerable provocation.72

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Pico Defends Magic and Kabbalah ­Here is the primal mage and sorcerer. —­p l o t i n u s

1. ​ Oration V, 56–62 “I have also proposed theorems about magic,” Pico wrote, explaining that a magus in ancient Persia was a servant of God. But Latin used one word, magia, where Greek had two: mageia was natu­ral and admirable, goêteia was demonic and hateful (56). The distinction was universal in law, philosophy, and religion: eminent authorities praised natu­ral magic as holy, reliable, and reputable but cursed the demonic kind as false, useless, and disgraceful (57). Instructed by exotic wisdom, Plato described magic as theology and as medicine for the soul: other sages agreed (58). Plotinus taught that the magus shuns demons and serves Nature by revealing what has been concealed—­hidden but natu­ral forces that bind the universe together (59–60). Although demonic magic destroys ­humans by enslaving them to God’s enemies, natu­ral magic leads to virtue and piety through astonishment at God’s works (61). And yet many have not understood ­these magical won­ders and despise them (62). They are like dogs snarling at strangers, Pico charged, and he challenged them with ideas that he traced to antiquity, when Persian invaders introduced Eu­ro­pe­ans to the word magus. The first magoi known to Greeks ­were ­enemy aliens and therefore disreputable, but they w ­ ere religious specialists—as Pico believed—­not sacrilegious sorcerers. According to tradition, the Magi gave no credence to the goêteia that Plotinus sometimes contrasted with genuine mageia. A nameless commentator made clearer distinctions: 420



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“Drugs are one ­thing, sorcery (goêteia) another and magic (mageia) something e­ lse. We use drugs by taking hellebore through the mouth or applying it as a salve. But sorcery is called up from matter-­bound and unclean spirits (daimones) who do evil; it gets its name from sorcerers who chant dirges (goôn tôn thrênôn). Magic does its work through ­middle angelic spirits, however, as well as the matter-­bound.” Both mageia and goêteia called on spirits, but goêteia off ended good daimones by summoning them to raise the dead. Augustine called all demons evil, however, while acknowledging that magia, theurgia, and goetia had distinct meanings in Latin. He knew Porphyry’s demonology and understood his claim that magoi are “experts who serve the gods.” From this pagan point of view, a magician who called up a spirit might be practicing a pious skill. But Augustine’s was the usual Christian position: magic needs demons, with whom any communication is evil.1 This legacy from late antiquity left Pico—­also Ficino—­with ­little basis for a clean distinction between good and bad magic: a purely natu­ral magic, involving no personal agency at all, was unknown to Greek theorists and rejected by many Christians. A d if­fer­ent approach was to treat magic as ­either exoteric or esoteric—­a natu­ral type for public use and a non-­natural type to be kept secret. Although “rites of evil demons” w ­ ere unnatural and forbidden to Christians, the faithful w ­ ere taught to venerate angels and address them openly in prayer. From a plea in church to Saint Michael it was a short step to a liturgy for Metatron, a secret but arguably lawful magic invoking a good personal agent with superhuman powers—an angel. Did Pico want to advertise natu­ral magic while keeping quiet about angel-­ magic? His t­ heses on magic (M) in the ninth part of T2 suggest so.2 The first four propositions distinguish good magic from bad in the same terms used by the Oration; the next ten discuss magical forces and argue that understanding them supports Christian doctrine. Then the fifteenth thesis brings Kabbalah into the mix: T2M15 ​No magical action can have any eff ect ­unless it has an act of Kabbalah, explicit or implicit, linked with it.

And the final thesis of this set, T2M26, declares that “if the Kabbalah is pure and unmediated, something happens that no magic touches.” Other propositions focus on language as the medium for magical eff ects. Sounds that do not signify (like ‘abracadabra’ or a m elody without lyr­ics) have more power than sounds used as signifiers by h ­ uman convention, and no

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singular names (like Socrates) that are meaningful can do magic ­unless they are Hebrew (like names of Sefirot or angels) or derived from Hebrew. Nonalphabetic signs or “characters” are magical, however, like numbers in Kabbalah, according to T2M25. Magical “numbers of numbers” in T2M23 are the threefold and the tenfold—­like the ten Sefirot with a triad at the top. The sefirotic space of Kabbalah is above the magus, according to T2M18: Nature’s magical powers rise only to the horizon between time and eternity. Only Kabbalah can empower magic, constrained by time and place, to cross this boundary at the edge of Nature, where merely natu­ral magic is confined. And yet a magic that could transcend Nature—­a magic with super­natural ambitions—­might address the immortal Sefirot without actually ascending to them, which only Kabbalah could do. Pico’s speech conjures with their names—­Gabriel, Metatron, Michael, and Raphael, monitors of the Cherubic life. Abulafia wrote that Cherub, Enoch, and Metatron w ­ ere “dif­fer­ent names in our language” for the Agent Intellect, who had “many other names besides, . . . ​and he rules over the hierarchy of angels. . . . ​The Intellect or Intelligence in our language is called . . . ​malach or ‘angel’ or cherub. . . . ​Our wise men often call him . . . ​Henoch, and they say that Henoch is Mattatron.”3 The magical phase of the Cherubic life starts in Nature but rises higher if a magus can speak the language of Kabbalah to angels: angelic and sefirotic rites reach beyond the limits of natu­ral magic ­because super­natural persons are addressed. Nonetheless, Pico did not invoke angels when he defended magic in the Oration, nor did he turn—as Ficino did—to the ‘occult qualities’ of scholastic metaphysics. But Kabbalah was on hand to solve the prob­ lem diagnosed by his opening statement about two types of magic: “one is the most dishonest of arts, the other a higher and holier philosophy; one is hollow and useless, the other solid, strong and reliable.” “The most dishonest of arts” was Pliny’s phrase from his hostile history of magic. But Pico defended mageia by naming other authorities who approved it and by tracing their lore to faraway places in the distant past: Hermes Trismegistus did not make the prince’s list, however, and some other names ­were just exotic decoration, like “Carondas, Damigeron, Apollonius, Hostanes and Dardanus”: Apuleius had denounced four of them to defend himself against a charge of criminal sorcery. When Pico mentioned Alkindi, Roger Bacon, and William of Auvergne as “more recent authorities,” he said only that they “had picked up the scent of magic.” He went farther in a thesis on Platonism (Pla):



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T2Pla45 ​The sentience in nature posited by Alkindi, Bacon, William of Paris, and some o ­ thers—­but especially all the Magi—is nothing other than the sentience in the vehicle posited by Platonists.

Believing that souls accumulate this “vehicle” while falling through the heavens into bodies, Platonists thought of the covering as a carrier of astral influence: ­there they located magical power without appealing directly to personal agents—­like demons. In the Apology, Pico cited William—­a renowned scholastic philosopher—to show that natu­ral magic was not necromancy. William claimed that “certain marvelous eff ects are actually produced naturally, . . . ​should not be called enchantments (incantationes), . . . ​and are in fact natu­ral actions, the knowledge of which is one of the eleven parts of natu­ral knowledge (scientia), where nothing is done with help from demons.” Similar expressions of naturalism prob­ably attracted him to Alkindi and Bacon.4 Like hidden sources of power, the glamor of exotic wisdom was also captivating—­even for Plato, who recorded two statements about magic that Socrates made while discussing a Thracian and a Persian or Chaldean. One remark described a charm—­“medicine for the mind” in Pico’s words—­ acquired by Thracian healers e­ ither from Zalmoxis, their king, or from Abaris the Hyperborean. Zalmoxis was “a servant of Pythagoras,” according to Iamblichus, and he told tales about Abaris, a priest of Apollo from the far north who flew on a magic arrow. Socrates also mentioned Zoroaster, but Pliny and other authorities w ­ ere unsure about the prophet’s identity and chronology. Pico called his magic “knowledge of divinity,” recalling Plato’s story that the magic taught to Persian princes was “ser­vice to the gods.” Zoroaster’s Chaldean magic imparted sacred wisdom, just as the Thracian magic of Zalmoxis gave lessons in virtue and temperance.5 If t­ hese instructions ­were secret, all the better: the best counsel was hidden, as the prophet Isaiah said. Even Homer concealed the magic in his Odyssey, but the prince promised a “poetic theology” that would uncover such mysteries—­like Porphyry in his Cave of the Nymphs, where teachings by ancient theologians ­were extracted from a few of Homer’s verses. In the same spirit, the Areopagite affirmed that a poetic reading of scriptural mysteries was pious and that Christian theology had its own “sacred poetical forms.” 6 ­After Pico lined up witnesses for magic, he still needed a t heory to explain how it could be natu­ral, and he took some of his ideas from Plotinus.

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The g­ reat Platonist thought that magic worked by “sympathy and by the fact in Nature that ­there is an agreement of like forces and an opposition of unlike . . . ​with no interfering machination; . . . ​the true magic (mageia) is internal to the All. . . . ​­Here is the primal mage and sorcerer—­discovered by men who thenceforth turn t­ hese same ensorcellations and magic arts (goêteia) upon one another.” Magic is always already ­there in Nature. Magicians cannot cause magical eff ects, but they know how to find the ­causes and exploit them. This supports Pico’s case—­except that Plotinus did not bother to distinguish mageia from goêteia in a clear and consistent way. Magic was just another fact about Nature that distracted the sage and dragged weaker souls down to entombment in ­matter. Natu­ral magic might help the lower soul but could not take it higher. Plotinus made other distinctions, however, asking how the sage stood “with regard to magic (goêteia) and philtre-­spells. In the soul he is immune from magic (goêteia); his reasoning part cannot be touched by it, he cannot be perverted. But ­there is in him the unreasoning ele­ment which comes from the (material) All, and in this he can be aff ected, or rather this can be aff ected in him. Philtre-­love, however, he ­will not know. . . . ​And just as the unreasoning ele­ment responds to the call of incantation, so the sage himself ­will dissolve t­ hese horrible powers by counter-­incantations.” Even the celestials feel evil powers in their unreasoning parts, and “visioning alone stands untouched by magic (goêteia).” This was not what Pico needed to hear if he was to save natu­ral magic.7 Plotinus put the crucial diff erence not between types of magic but between levels of the soul: only the highest was invulnerable to magic. According to Porphyry, who studied with Plotinus, when a rival phi­los­o­ pher attacked his teacher by star-­casting—by aiming beams from a star at his victim—­the destructive magic bounced back on the assailant without any eff ort from the master. Although the sage once permitted a séance that summoned his guardian angel, who turned out to be divine, on another occasion he refused to attend a r eligious festival and made the famous remark about who should wait on whom—­“ better that they should come to him than he to them,” as Pico wrote.8 Magic—­a headline for Pico—­was a f ootnote for Plotinus, whose philosophy was a metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic system of g­ reat complexity, subtlety, and beauty. Pico ignored the depths along with the confounding details when he turned to him for an exculpating princi­ple: the magus operates “not so much by working won­ders as by diligently serving nature



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as she works them.” Plotinus gave Pico this axiom for his theory without making a sharp distinction between mageia and goêteia. “Qualities inducing love induce mutual approach.” Hence, according to the phi­los­o­pher, “­there has arisen an art of magical love-­drawing (goêteia) whose prac­ti­ tion­ers apply by contact certain substances . . . ​so informed with love as to eff ect a bond of ­union; they knit soul to soul as they might train two separate trees t­ owards one another. . . . ​Supposing the mage to stand outside the All, his evocations and invocations would no longer avail to draw up or to call down.”9 In Pico’s plainer words—­with help from Roman poets—­“as a farmer marries elm to vine, so a magus joins earth to heaven.” Nuptializing this vineyard image, he picked the theme up from one of his ­theses: T2M13 ​­Doing magic is nothing but marrying the world.

Ovid had told about Vertumnus, a shape-­shifting harvest god: when Vertumnus pursued Pomona, an orchard deity, he carried a ladder to climb elms that supported ripe fruit in his vineyard. Like a magus, according to Pico, the farmer climbed high to bring fruit from above to below. The Chaldean Oracles develop a similar analogy—­about energizing natu­ral sympathies—in a dif­fer­ent way. ­These enigmatic fragments compare God’s thoughts to birds called ‘jynxes’ (iunges)—­either wagtails or wrynecks—­thought to be magical ­because of their striking be­hav­ior. A jynx was also a toy, a perforated disk sliding on a loop of string and perhaps making a whirring sound; it was also a spell cast by an orator’s oratory: the En­g lish ‘jinx’ descends from all this. When Synesius—­a Neoplatonist Christian bishop—­condemned goêteia, he commented on the jynxes and their sympathetic spells: “The limbs of this All, since they are one in breathing together and feeling together, relate to one another as if they w ­ ere limbs of a single ­whole. And the jynxes of the Magi may be the same, for spells are cast as if they ­were signing to one another, and the sage, recognizing kinship among parts of the cosmos, draws the one through the other.” Alluding to the jynxes, Pico concluded that magic “calls out of hiding into the light powers sown by a gracious God and scattered over the world.” His choice of words points to Apuleius in the background. Accused of collecting ­recipes for criminal magic, the Roman Platonist had defended his remarkable knowledge of fish (think of Tobias, Raphael and Asmodeus) as innocent information—­mere facts of nature and good ­things to eat.10 To see why Pico also wanted to keep his magic natu­ral—at least in public—­ compare Plotinus with his successors in the long line of Neoplatonist

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masters. When Plotinus founded the school, he taught that philosophy was the only escape from Nature and its magic. He authorized no ritual—no theurgy—as a way up, and no magic frightened him. “No man self-­gathered falls to a spell,” he claimed. “Alone in immunity from magic (goêteia) is he who, though drawn by the alien parts of his total being, withholds his assent to their standards of worth, recognizing the good only where his au­then­tic self sees and knows it . . . ​, tranquilly possessing and so never charmed away.” Theurgy had no place in this serene spirituality ­until Porphyry adapted the Chaldean Oracles to Platonism. The Oracles revealed the Chaldean sacrament to Porphyry—­not just a sanctified alternative to goêteia but also a complement to the life of virtue, though theurgical eff ects ­were confined to the lower soul. Magic worked, but only within Nature: spells and charms ­were useless for a higher ascent. Philosophy was the only loftier path, in Porphyry’s opinion, or at least the most reliable. But Iamblichus, prob­ably his student, set less store by philosophy: he worried that disciplined thinking, by itself, could not lift the soul to u ­ nion. A s age needed his thoughts, plainly. But philosophy was not enough for ascent and less eff ective than theurgy which—­according to Iamblichus—­actually touched the higher soul. The ‘god-­working’ in theurgy was work done by or with gods on high, he believed, but without awareness on their part. Down below, ­human actions (rites) working on natu­ral objects (symbols) picked up and transmitted divine energies that w ­ ere pre­sent everywhere: no need for gods to ­will the particulars or manage the details. That was what a magus did, and his ceremonies and materials ­were always already energized by erotic forces flowing from above to below and back. At the lower, earthly pole of this organic cir­cuit, sympathies in Nature could be or­ga­nized and manipulated. Some useful tools ­were rituals and lower theurgies, tapping Nature’s energies but not raising the soul all the way up to ­union: only higher theurgies made the final leap pos­si­ble. Lower down, meanwhile, mortals felt the power of divine love as the magic in Nature. Lesser actions and powers—­ lower theurgy and natu­ral magic—­prepared initiates for higher rites that might lead to ­union, if all went well. Unlike theurgy as a catalyst for the virtuous life, this nobler practice required prior education in the virtues—­ like the refined magic that Plato and Pico ascribed to Zoroaster.11 Plotinus himself taught that “love is given in Nature,” but—­unlike his successors—he never divided this unitary force into a hierarchy of angels and demons. Once the love was personalized and subdivided by Porphyry



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and Iamblichus, once the erotic metaphysics became a demonology, then, since magic was always already t­ here, the demons w ­ ere always t­ here too. And a purely natu­ral magic was impossible. Moreover, even if divine love made the theurgy good, its misuse was dangerous, as Iamblichus recognized. The same risk worried Pico: talking about Kabbalist magic, he warned in thesis T2K13 that “one who makes a ­mistake in the work or comes to it unpurified ­will be devoured by Azazel.”12 Nonetheless, good magic was more than just natu­ral for Pico: it was also “divine and helpful.” Natu­ral magic “excites man to astonishment at God’s works. . . . ​­There is no greater stimulus to religion or to any worship of God than constantly contemplating God’s marvels.” This visionary astonishment, this epoptic magic, persists through the fifth and sixth steps of Pico’s regimen: just as natu­ral philosophy comes before divine theology in his preliminary curriculum, magical visioning precedes Kabbalah’s deeper intimations of divinity at higher levels of experience, just before mystical u ­ nion: 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

­ nion u Kabbalah magic theology natu­ral philosophy dialectic ethics

Among the relevant ­theses in Pico’s Conclusions, the most provocative was T2M9 ​­There is no knowledge that gives us more certainty of Christ’s divinity than magic and Kabbalah.13

But the notorious proposition seems less outrageous in context: T2M6 ​Any astonishing eff ect that occurs, ­whether it is magic or Kabbalah or some other kind, must be referred chiefly and mainly to the glorious and blessed God, whose grace rains down supercelestial ­waters of wondrous power e­ very day on contemplative ­people of good ­w ill. T2M7 ​Christ’s deeds cannot have been done e­ ither by a method of Kabbalah or by a method of magic. T2M8 ​Christ’s miracles are the most certain evidence of his divinity not b ­ ecause of what was done but ­because of how it was done.

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In this last thesis Pico was pointing out that Christ was not a stage wizard like Simon Magus in the book of Acts: clever performers like Simon often manipulated nature to trick an audience, but Christ’s miracles ­were super­ natural. In all cases, no m ­ atter which intermediate power produces which phenomenon, the Creator is the First Cause of e­ very eff ect, according to T2M6. And the Creator is Christ, who needed no magic or Kabbalah or any other secondary cause to do what he had already done as First Cause, according to T2M7.14 Then what does T2M9 claim about Christ’s divinity? When Pico defended this thesis in the Apology, he tried to distract his accusers with a logic game about “stating a negation disjunctively with three categoricals.” More to the point, he also clarified the type of knowledge that he meant to compare with magic and Kabbalah. It was ­human knowledge, he insisted, based on experience, not revelation. It was not revealed theology, as his opponents charged, but natu­ral philosophy of the usual scholastic type—­the study of physical change below the Moon. ­Because magic and Kabbalah look higher to the stars and beyond, knowledge of them is nobler—­hence a better index of certainty by the norms of T2M6–8. That “magic is the noblest part of natu­ral knowledge,” as in T2M4, follows from a related line of reasoning.15 But Pico proposed two other ­theses about magic that ­were riskier—­ though they w ­ ere not among the thirteen initially condemned. Although acts of magic need Kabbalah to be eff ective (T2M15), acts of Kabbalah can be eff ective without magic (T2M26). Hence, ­because Kabbalah’s domain is higher than Nature, an exculpation of natu­ral magic does not and need not apply to Kabbalah’s super­natural eff ects, which Pico, at the time he wrote the Conclusions, thought to be not just licit but also right and good: all the better in that Kabbalah forced Jews to affirm the Christian creed—so the prince insisted. Gazing at the starry sky to find the magic ­there stimulates religion through “astonishment at God’s works.” The benefits include truths of natu­ ral theology, like God’s existence, derived by h ­ uman reason from natu­ral philosophy. Pagan sages like Aristotle ­were masters of this natu­ral knowledge and experts on natu­ral virtue: temperance, courage, and justice as well as wisdom. And then Pico added faith, hope, and charity, which are super­ natural virtues, to the “absolutely certain eff ects” that come from magic if it is “divine and helpful.” ­These three theological virtues, gifts to Christians by God’s grace, rise above the four natu­ral virtues at higher levels of Pico’s regimen, just as acts of Kabbalah are more power­ful than natu­ral magic.



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Duly excited by magic and improved by it, we are “stirred to love and worship the Creator with a hotter passion, and then we are forced to sing that ­ hole earth with your glory’s famous song: full are the heavens, full is the w greatness.” The hymn is angelic—­Seraphic, in fact, better than Cherubic—­ and prayerful as well, hoping for the bliss of nothingness to come, a­ fter magic has done all it can do as the best use of natu­ral knowledge.16

2. ​ Oration VI, 63–68 Pico recovered his next topic from “ancient mysteries of the Jews.” Having shown how magic underwrites Christian doctrine, he claimed that Kabbalah also confirms the faith, even though some dismissed the Hebrew mysteries as frauds. Looking closer and consulting experts, the prince saw ­great value in t­ hese secrets, despite their difficulty, concluding that the faithful needed them to protect their religion against attacks by Jews (63). Even Christian authorities supported Hebrew sages who traced Kabbalah to Moses on Sinai, where God gave him not only the public Law but also a private interpretation and commanded him to keep it hidden (64). Greeks and Egyptians, pagans and Christians have kept this rule of secrecy (65). The word Kabbalah means ‘reception,’ and the priest Ezra told how it was received and transmitted (66). His words hint at secrets of natu­ral philosophy, metaphysics, and theology, preserved in Latin translations commissioned by a pope (67). When Pico bought such books at ­great cost, he found—in texts revered and guarded by Jews—­the same theology taught by Paul and the Church F ­ athers, and enriched by Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy. He discovered not just the Trinity but a triad of Trinities. Such wisdom would refute the Jews in any dispute—as the prince himself had witnessed (68). Pico defended magic against p ­ eople who “often denounce and detest what they do not understand.” In the same spirit—­since secrets of Kabbalah “confirm the most holy and Catholic faith”—he would clarify Jewish enigmas as well, to keep uninformed critics from treating them as “fallacious nonsense.” This was his task in the last large section of the Oration, which introduces the 72 ­theses at the end of the Conclusions: t­ hese propositions ­were the least intelligible of all for the prince’s audience and the most unsettling. Even if his magic scandalized them, the topic itself was nothing new. Christians had been debating magic for centuries and fearing it. A pa pal letter written in 1484—­printed two years ­later with the

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Hammer of Witches as Pico was planning to dispute in Rome—­licensed inquisitors to protect the faithful against “incantations, charms, conjurations and other abominable superstitions.”17 If the prince had been just a l­ ittle prudent, he might have expected his critics to find Kabbalah just as alarming as witchcraft. Instead, he planned to co-­opt the opposition by promoting Jewish mysteries as weapons against Jews. The tactic was malicious but sincere: he believed he had new proofs of Christian doctrines long rejected by Jews, and he thought that Jews themselves had produced the evidence. The heading of the T2K ­theses claims “power­ful confirmation of the Christian religion from the very princi­ples of Hebrew sages,” and the speech makes the same point—­that books of Kabbalah describe “a religion not so much Mosaic as Christian.”18 To win Roman clerics over to his proj­ect, Pico appealed to their prejudices by pledging to fight “savage slanders by Jews.” He also named Christian doctrines that he found in Kabbalah—­but without explaining how he found them. The doctrines themselves, above all the Trinity, w ­ ere well known. ­Because Kabbalah was so strange, however, he had to explain its name and tell its story. But he said nothing in his speech to introduce basic ele­ments of Kabbalah presented in the Conclusions for discussion and debate.19 Preparing an Oration of a f ew thousand words, the prince had l­ ittle choice. Consider t­ hese cryptic expressions—­cryptic for Christians: the Doe with One Horn, the Explicit Name, the Green Line, the Lord of the Nose, the Mirror That Does Not Shine, and the North Wind. Many Kabbalists knew them, and Pico used them in his ­theses. But how much could he explain in a short speech? Other terms—­a lso basic and just as obscure—­ were numerical: 6 E xtremities of the Building, God’s 10 Garments, 32 Paths of Wisdom, 50 Gates of Understanding, and a Jubilee of 50,000 years. ­ ere In the Oration he did not even say what the Sefirot ­were or why they w both 3 and 7 as well as 10.20 Already, however, before introducing Kabbalah, the speech had described numbering as the “supreme and preeminently divine science.” The exposition of Kabbalah also mentions two numbers—40 and 70—­because Ezra and his scribes took 40 days to produce 70 books. Other­w ise, ­t here is nothing numerical in this part of the speech except the number of books of Kabbalah subsidized by Sixtus IV—­t hree of them. ­After finishing with Jewish mysteries, however, Pico attributed a “secret doctrine of numbers” to the Orphic Hymns, even though the Orphic ­t heses come before Kabbalah in the Conclusions. Numbering turns up



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again at the close of the speech to assure the prince’s listeners that a total of 900 was exactly right for his ­t heses and that he was not “piling the numbers up.” He had told his friend Benivieni that 900 was a “mystical number.” Evidently, as he completed his Oration, the orator was thinking about numbers, while staying s­ ilent about numerology as a m ethod in Kabbalah.21 Why not reveal this method in a speech that announces so many puzzles without solving them? Three Orphic ­theses (Or) describe mystical numbers in the Hymns, and two Kabbalist t­ heses blend t­ hese poems with Hebrew secrets, especially t­ hose revealed by Menahem Recanati’s Commentary on the Daily Prayers, as Latinized by Flavius. Thesis T2K10 identifies the Orphic Pallas with Metatron. T2K17 claims that the Purest Wine (S10) in Kabbalah shows what nine “Bacchi signify according to Orpheus”: they are Kabbalah’s Muses, the nine Sefirot above S10. The biblical text that led Pico to them by way of Bacchus and Orpheus was a Psalm by the Jewish Orpheus, named along with the gentile hero in this thesis: T2Or4 ​Just as David’s hymns are wonderfully useful for an act of Kabbalah, so are the hymns of Orpheus useful for an act of true, licit, and natu­ral magic.

Pico had pre­ce­dent for hiding secrets in the number of his t­ heses b ­ ecause Orpheus, a sacred singer like David, had done this with his own songs, as revealed by the next thesis: T2Or5 ​Numbered ­under the figure of the Pythagorean tetractys, the number of the Orphic Hymns is the same as the number by which the threefold God created the world.

The number of the Psalms, 150, was surely meaningful: the placement of each Psalm in this sequence convinced the Church F ­ athers that number was a source of power, which Pico called magical in the Apology. Likewise, just as the Hymns hid a secret in their total count, mysteries also lurked in smaller groups of songs, like the “eightfold number of maritime hymns” in T2Or12 or the “septet attributed to the ­Father’s Mind” by T2Or20. Speaking of ­those seven, the next thesis declares that T2Or21 ​The eff ect of the preceding hymns is nothing without an act of Kabbalah, whose special result is to put ­every figural, continuous and discrete quantity into practice.22

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“Discrete quantity” is material for arithmetic with integers. “Continuous” quantity requires geometry, which needs other operations, like taking a root, that integers and their ratios cannot always express. Between geometry and arithmetic come figural or ‘formal’ shapes that combine geometry’s pictorial force with the clear distinctions of arithmetic, as seen in the tetractys,

• • • •

• •

•

• •

•

The Hymns show by their number, which is 86, that Pythagorean arithmetic is figural, according to T2Or5, and that God created the world with the same number. In the Torah that Moses made public, in the story of the first day, the Creator’s name is Elohim, whose letters add up to 86. But the Creator in T2Or5 is a “ threefold God,” and a t hesis on Kabbalah unveils a trinity of his fourfold names: T2K6 ​Someone with a d eep knowledge of Kabbalah can understand that the three g­ reat fourfold names of God contained in secrets of Kabbalists o ­ ught to be assigned to the three persons of the Trinity by a wondrous allocation so that the name ‫ אהיה‬belongs to the ­Father, the name ‫ יהוה‬to the Son, the name ‫ אדני‬to the Holy Spirit.

The printer of the 1486 Conclusions left blank spaces for the Hebrew names. Reconstructed by Chaim Wirszubski—­whose knowledge of Kabbalah was deep indeed—­t hey are Ehyeh (S1), yhw h (S6), and Adonai ­ ecause each has four letters, whereas Elo(S10). All three are “fourfold” b him has five, adding up to 86—­which Pico thought to be the number of the Orphic Hymns. This number, like the name Elohim and its number, ­were public, unlike the Trinitarian mystery of the “three ­great fourfold names.” Since one of their secrets was the number 72, they showed—as figural numbers—­what Pico would not say in Rome: that just as the count of all his t­ heses was a “mystical number,” so was the number of the last ­t heses that describe Kabbalah.23



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God’s holiest Name, yhw h, has four letters—­yod (‫)י‬, he (‫)ה‬, waw (‫)ו‬, he (‫)ה‬, which are 10, 5, 6, and 5 a gain, reading ‫ יהוה‬from right to left. By repeated addition, their sum is 72: 10 is yod; 15 is yod + he; 21 is yod + he + waw; and 26 is yod + he + waw + he. The sum of the subtotals—10 + 15 + 21 + 26—is 72. Displayed in the Pythagorean way as a tetractys, a resulting figural number is ‫י‬ ‫  ה‬+   ‫י‬ ‫   י‬+  ‫  ה‬+   ‫ו‬ ‫  ה‬+   ‫   ו‬+  ‫  ה‬+  ‫י‬

An inverted tetractys reflects yhw h in a dif­fer­ent pattern: ‫י    י    י    י‬ ‫ה   ה  ה‬ ‫ ו‬

‫ו‬ ‫ה‬

The Name’s four numerals produce 72 in a similar way: 10  +  10  +  10  +  10

=  40



5  +  5  +  5

=  15



6  +  6

=  12



5

=    5



72

One reason for Pico to keep such calculations out of the Oration was practical: laying out techniques of numerology in a f oreign language would have made the speech too long and too hard. Th ­ ere was also a m ­ atter of princi­ple—­following his own rule about secrecy—­though ­theses of T2K, T2M, and T2Or show that the rule was not inviolable. Yet some mysteries ­were dangerous, and 72 was one of them.24 A person who knew the secret of 72 would realize that three verses of Exodus 14 add up to God’s own name while also concealing names of angels. Angels help h ­ umans but also threaten them—as they threatened Jacob when he dozed ­u nder their ladder. In sefirotic space, Michael’s Love at S4 conflicts with Gabriel’s Justice at S5. Other spirits, like Azazel and Samael,

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are evil and more menacing. Pico could ask Metatron, the mightiest angel of all, to protect him against them. He could also use an amulet—­ maybe a stellate hexagram like the Seal of Solomon or Shield of David—

• •

• •

•

• •

•

• •

•

•

• —to ward off evil spirits: this hexagram is a double shield, overlaying an inverted tetractys on the upright figure. To make such an amulet or invoke a protecting angel would need the right Kabbalah, and if the Kabbalist made a ­mistake, a demon might destroy him. ­There ­were good reasons to keep quiet about 72.25 Instead of giving his audience more reasons to agree that such mysteries ­were worth the risk, the prince’s quicker and safer course was to tell a story about Kabbalah that was already public—­more or less—in an apocryphal Book of Esdras. The tale began when Jews ­under Zerubabbel “turned their attention to recovering the Law.” Judah was then a Persian province, where the T ­ emple was rebuilt in the sixth c­ entury, when Cyrus released the Jews from Babylon. At that time—­according to Pico—­Esdras or Ezra “corrected the book of Moses,” but the disruption was such that the “custom of passing the Law from person to person could not be kept as the elders had established it.” Worried that all knowledge of God’s commands would be lost, Ezra “arranged for sages who then survived to . . . ​contribute what each remembered of the mysteries of the Law, and scribes w ­ ere brought in to compile t­ hese contributions in 70 volumes”—an ancient archive of esoteric wisdom.26 God, appearing to the priest Ezra in his seventh vision, told him how the Law had been given to Moses on Sinai. As Ezra was about to exit the lower world, a­ fter the ­Temple burned and the Law was destroyed, the Lord explained that he had shown Moses “secrets of times and ends of times” before giving the priest this order: “­These words you ­shall make public, and ­these you ­shall conceal.” Ezra, a new Moses, was then commanded to appoint five scribes and write new books, “making some public, giving



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some to the wise for concealment.” A ­ fter the five scribes (not 70) took 40 days to write 94 books, God again told the prophet to make some of them public—­the 24 parts of the Hebrew canon—­but to conceal the other 70. Although the written Law handed down to Moses was to be read by all, this oral Law was originally secret—­and a license for rabbinical hermeneutics. In the priest’s vision as Pico transmitted it, however, every­thing was written, though divided into public and private parts—­the latter thought by the prince to be books of Kabbalah.27 Early Christians reinforced ­these traditions. Hilary mentioned “certain more secret mysteries of the Law from hidden sources,” implying that Moses did not write them down but “made them known separately to the seventy elders.” Origen taught that scripture contains “both the manifest and the hidden.” A wise man hides his trea­sure, he explained, “thinking it not without danger to reveal to every­body the secret meanings,” and then the sage “goes away, . . . ​receiving from the ­people of God the oracles of God with which Jews ­were first entrusted.” Origen also analyzed the parable of the pearl and the Savior’s warning not to “give something holy to dogs” or waste trea­sures on swine—in Pico’s view a “divine command, not ­human judgment,” to keep the holiest ­things hidden.28 God himself concealed a store­house of Kabbalist riches u ­ nder the “bark of the Law and rough surface of its words,” according to Pico. Jesus also entrusted secrets to his disciples, which the Evangelists conveyed in parables. When the Areopagite discussed divinization, he called it God’s gift from scripture—­“oracles transmitted by our divine initiators.” This apostolic knowledge was oracular, “not for every­one,” not to be written, only spoken “from mind to mind, by means of speech—­even bodily speech, yet more immaterial just the same, as being beyond writing.”29 When Pico repeated the Areopagite’s words, he knew that pagans had given the same advice. Pythagoras forbade his d ­ aughter Damo to show his notes to anyone “outside the h ­ ouse.” Plato taught his successors a rule that enforced Pythagorean silence and the secrecy of ancient Egypt, signified by sphinxes: the phi­los­o­pher wrote openly about concealing. His student Aristotle divided his works into private and public: exoteric texts ­were written down for open use, especially to teach politics and rhe­toric; acroatic or esoteric teachings about “deeper and subtler philosophy” w ­ ere unwritten, heard only by students ready to study the metaphysical theology, which—­according to Pico—­a lso encouraged dialectic and natu­ral science. When Aristotle eventually wrote his spoken secrets down and released them, Alexander the ­Great—­once his student—­sent a l etter to

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complain and got the answer that Pico quoted: “Know that ­those books, with their secrets not then hidden, are published and yet not published since they w ­ ill be intelligible only to t­ hose who have heard us.”30 Having called a crowd of witnesses to testify for natu­ral magic, Pico did the same for secrecy in Kabbalah. God gave Moses “not just the Law . . . ​in five books but also a true and more secret reading” of the Law. The Lord’s instruction “to make the Law public” was one command, but another was “not to divulge the interpretation of the Law or write it down.” The Law carved on tablets and written on scrolls was for all to see and obey, displaying God’s power, mercy, and justice, stating his w ­ ill, and showing “how to live a good and holy life and worship in the true religion.” To do all this, “the ­simple story was enough,” in the prince’s judgment. But the interpretation of the Law was a mystery, neither public nor s­ imple. “Moses was to reveal it only to Jesus Nave,” Pico explained, “and he in turn to the high priests who succeeded him, u ­ nder a strict rule of silence.”31 What Moses passed on privately to Joshua (Jesus Nave in the Vulgate) was Kabbalah. The Hebrew word—­Cabala in Pico’s Latin—­can be an ordinary noun meaning ‘reception’ or ‘tradition,’ as Abulafia explained in Ve-­Zot. His topic was the “Kabbalah through which secrets of the Law are received from the mouth of one person to the mouth of another, ­those secrets that only the Kabbalists of our ­people and our nation receive. For they are called masters of Kabbalah b ­ ecause of this reception and this way of receiving, which does not exist in other nations.” In Pico’s telling, “one person would receive that teaching from another not through written rec­ords but from a regular succession of revelations, as if by a law of inheritance.”32 As the prince retold Ezra’s story of newly written secrets, the number 70 matched only one detail in the apocryphal text: 70 newer books ­were kept private when 24 ­were made public out of an original 94. Hilary and Origen confirmed that each new book was assigned to one of 70 ancients: the same number of elders had joined the march out of Sinai. When God directed Moses to find helpers who could share the burden of revelation, he ordered him to “gather unto me seventy men of the ancients of Israel, . . . ​and bring them to the door of the Tabernacle . . . ​that I may come down and speak. . . . ​ And the Lord came down in a cloud and spoke to him, taking away the spirit that was in Moses and giving it to the seventy men, . . . ​and they prophesied.” Seventy elders also appeared in tales of Kabbalah where the Zohar bewailed “words of the Torah that are concealed” ­because Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai left them hidden when he ascended to heaven—­the



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Rashbi being the Zohar’s legendary author. Another rabbi compares him to Moses: “He held back some of the spirit that was upon him and put it upon the seventy men, the elders—­like a lamp from which many lamps are lit.” Like the first Moses, Rashbi passed his illumination on to many students—­disciples as remote as Pico—­who never let his light go dark. Pico ­will also have been thinking of the 70 or 71 or 72 translators of the Septuagint and the members of the ­Great Sanhedrin.33 In their 70 books, Ezra’s scribes preserved “a vein of intellect and a spring of wisdom and a stream of knowledge.” ­These sacred ­waters, as Pico saw them, w ­ ere theology, metaphysics, and natu­ral philosophy, flowing from a hidden source and pouring out into a mighty river—­like the “threefold particularizing philosophy about divine, m ­ iddle, and sensible natures” in thesis T2K2. T2K1 ​What­ever the rest of the Kabbalists may say, the first division that I would make divides knowledge of Kabbalah into knowing about Sefirot and Shemot, similar to practical and visionary (speculativus) knowledge. T2K2 ​What­ever other Kabbalists may say, I would divide the visionary part of Kabbalah into four, corresponding to the fourfold division of philosophy that I have usually proposed. First is what I call knowing how to revolve the alphabet, corresponding to the part of philosophy that I call comprehensive (catholica) philosophy. The second, third, and fourth part is the threefold Chariot, corresponding to a t hreefold particularizing (particularis) philosophy about divine, ­middle, and sensible natures. T2K3 ​Knowledge that is the practical part of Kabbalah puts into practice all of formal metaphysics and lower theology.34

­ ese three t­ heses, the first of the final 72, introduce Kabbalah by naming Th its parts. They are difficult not only ­because of Hebrew words like Sefirot and the terminology of a “threefold Chariot” but also b ­ ecause the typology is opaque, even where it matches some features of Pico’s system. What was the philosophia catholica in T2K2? Was it ‘universal’ or ‘Catholic’ (as in T2K5) or both or neither? Since catholicus contrasts with particularis, levels of generality may be the issue: perhaps “comprehensive” as opposed to “particularizing.” The “fourfold division of philosophy” is clearer, aligning with the first four steps—­ethics, dialectic, natu­ral philosophy, and theology—up Pico’s ladder. In this case, however, the tetrad is less a curriculum than an experience: “the visionary part of Kabbalah,” which

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in T2K1 is scientia Shemot, ­either a ‘science’ of divine names or just knowledge of them. The other part of Kabbalah is practical and about the Sefirot. Kabbalah practical visionary theosophical ecstatic Sefirot names revolving the alphabet naming the divine naming the ­middle naming the sensible

universal philosophy theology natu­ral philosophy ethics and dialectic

the Godhead higher Chariot ­middle Chariot lower Chariot

The practical kind of Kabbalah, according to T2K1, requires knowledge of the Sefirot—­a theology or theosophy. T2K3 says that Kabbalah of this type “puts into practice all of formal metaphysics and lower theology.” The Oration identifies the “vein of intellect” in Ezra’s books as theology—­though as “ineff able” and “supersubstantial,” not “lower.” Maybe lower theology is knowledge of God that language can express, in contrast with higher and inexpressible experience. The speech says that the “spring of wisdom” in Ezra’s books is a “finished” metaphysics of “angelic forms”—­a complete formal metaphysics? A Kabbalist theurgy, an angel magic, might make such a metaphysics practical. But who can say? Pico’s terse clues are hard to follow. Yet Kabbalist theosophy was practical, to be sure, ­because it studied God’s attributes in order to act on them. Preparing to redeem the initiate by marrying him to God, rituals of Kabbalah also stimulated sexuality among the Sefirot. Knowing their names, repeating them in prayer, and speaking other sacred words excited the initiate to mystical transport—­with a sexual component.35 This understanding of practical Kabbalah accounts for Ezra’s theology and metaphysics but not for the “river of knowledge” in natu­ral philosophy. Although Pico called this knowledge “most certain,” locating it in his outline is difficult. A Kabbalah that made theology and metaphysics practical but ignored Nature would deliver no magic t­ here. Maybe this was Pico’s point: that practical Kabbalah transcends the natu­ral magic that can achieve nothing without it, according to T2M15.36 The other kind of Kabbalah in T2K1 is speculativus. The Latin adjective (compare speculor and speculatio) is an analog of theôrêtikos from theôria in Greek—­the Areopagite’s term for visioning: a s uccessful initiate “not



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only envisions the sacred rites . . . ​but also has a divine awareness of sharing in the holy and thus partakes diff erently than other sanctified p ­ eople.” The three lower types of visioning in T2K2 are a “threefold Chariot”—­ Pico’s response to Ezekiel’s vision of God’s Throne and its wheels. The biblical Account of the Chariot, according to Maimonides, was r­ eally philosophical theology or metaphysics, just as the Account of the Beginning in Genesis was natu­ral philosophy hidden in the Bible’s creation story. Pico’s ­triple Chariot, prob­ably modeled on chariots (currus) in Recanati’s Kabbalah, was also a Christian vehicle—­a practical structure engineered from a theory with three parts “about divine, ­middle, and sensible natures.” As Pico envisioned Ezekiel’s vision, sages could learn from the prophet to gaze at the wheeled Throne and contemplate higher natures a­ fter examining the ­middle kind with natu­ral philosophy and purging lower experience with ethics and dialectic. Upon or above the Chariot the hidden God rode alone, named ineff ably by his holiest Name.37 In T2K2 a p reparation for visioning is “knowing how to revolve the alphabet.” This was Pico’s phrase for Abulafia’s response to the Account of the Chariot—­using God’s names and the letters in them for ecstatic meditation. All twenty-­two letters of the Hebrew alphabet are consonants, and the original text of the Bible spelled the sacred names without vocalization. But vowels w ­ ere needed to make a string of consonants, like bgdkpt, pronounceable—as begadkepat, for example. Proceeding through the alphabet in this way would ‘revolve’ it in a certain order, like ba, bi, bo, bu, ga, gi, go, gu, da, di . . . ​and on and on. Choosing the right consonants and vocalizing them correctly would put the mystic in a trance as he repeated letters from names of God, combining them with other letters from other words of power, chanting their sounds, breathing in certain rhythms, moving the body in certain patterns, and matching secret meanings with numerical values of letters and words. ­These ­were Abulafia’s paths to ecstasy—­starting with God’s holiest Name, the unutterable yhw h. His instructions w ­ ere to “begin by combining this Name . . . ​at the beginning alone, and examine all its combinations and move it and turn it about like a w heel returning around, front and back, like a scroll, and do not let it rest.”38 Wherever Pico was heading with his telegraphic description of Kabbalah, what he learned from Abulafia and other Jewish mystics was both enticing and alarming. Like Plotinus, who “lived as if he ­were ashamed of being in the body,” like Hermetic initiates who w ­ ere taught to “hate your body,” like Christian mystics who forgot that “the Word was made flesh,”

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Abulafia understood prophetic ecstasy as salvation from a degraded and defiled h ­ uman condition: “We are born through harlotry and lust and menstrual blood and urine. And we are a fetid drop at the time of our creation, as we are t­ oday, fetid and besmirched with filth and mud and vomit and excrement so that t­ here is no clean place. . . . ​And we s­ hall be dead carcasses, putrid and crushed in fire, like rubbish.” Although his aims ­were more ecstatic than ascetic, Abulafia urged his followers to abandon this repulsive world in order to be saved from it. He wanted them to “turn into separate angels” by attaining the state of prophecy and to be “saved by this from natu­ral death on the day of their . . . ​death and live forever.” A maxim from Maimonides—­that “the Torah is not preserved except by one who kills himself in the tents of wisdom”—­was the equivalent for Abulafia of the Socratic directive to practice death and of Platonic advice to flee the body.39 Perhaps a f ew Christians in Pico’s time would have found Abulafia’s body-­hating misguided, but the sexuality in Kabbalist theology would have horrified almost all of them, and its mysteries would have bewildered every­one—­including rites to join with Metatron, the angel prince identified by Abulafia with the Agent Intellect. Pico knew discussions of this metaphysical psy­chol­ogy by Christian scholastics, as well as the Averroist challenge to it, so he was prepared philosophically for an apotheosis of the Intellect in Kabbalah. Mystical ­union with the Intellect or Metatron eradicates the self. In Abulafia’s conception, however, the self vanishes not only within the Mind ­ ecause the mystic’s role is messianic as well as but also in ­favor of ­others b prophetic. The Intellect is the Anointed on high, and the initiate ascends ecstatically to become an angelic savior. The force of this transformation suff uses Abulafia’s imagery when he describes the mystic’s experience: “it ­will appear to him as if his entire body . . . ​has been anointed with the oil of anointing, . . . ​and he ­will be called the angel of the Lord.” 40 Shekinah, Shaddai and Holy Spirit ­were other names for Metatron, raising Abulafia’s rituals to the heights of divinity and taking g­ reat risks. The Shekinah at S10 is the Creator’s last emanation and first point of contact with creation: this commonplace of Kabbalah was a discovery for Pico but a riddle to his Christian contemporaries. And how could they possibly know about Enoch becoming Metatron in stories told by Jews for centuries—­like this encounter between the patriarch and a sage? Rabbi Ishmael asked: why are you called by the name of your Creator with seventy names? . . . ​He answered: ­because I am Enoch, the son of



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Jared. When the generation of the flood sinned and turned to evil deeds, . . . ​t he Holy One . . . ​took me from their midst to be a w itness against them . . . ​and brought me up in their lifetime, before their very eyes, to the heights of heaven . . . ​and appointed me in the height as a prince and a ruler among the ministering angels. Then three of the ministering angels, Uzza, Azza and Azzael, came forth and laid charges against me. . . . ​But the Holy One replied: . . . ​I have chosen this one in preference to all of you. . . . ​W hen the Holy One went out and in from the Garden to Eden and from Eden to the Garden, all gazed at the bright image of his Shekinah and ­were unharmed ­until the coming of the generation of Enosh, who was the head of all idol worshippers. . . . ​And they fashioned idols . . . ​and brought down the Sun, Moon, stars and constellations and stationed them before the idols. . . . ​This was only b ­ ecause Uzza, Azza and Azzael had taught them sorceries.

Mankind’s angelic potential was amazing but also threatening. Speculations about Metatron not only justified fearing demons and ratified confidence in angel magic, they also reached into places that good Christians like Pico should have approached only with rites sanctioned by the Church. That Enoch becomes Metatron, that h ­ umans turn into angels, was astounding enough. Beyond astonishment was addressing Metatron as Shaddai, a name of God, b ­ ecause 314 is the numerical value of both names. If Pico learned from Jews that Metatron is the Messiah, El Shaddai, and the Shekinah, he had evidence (soon to be examined) for more than one Trinity among the Sefirot.41 Despite such outlandish notions in books of Kabbalah, Sixtus IV—­who was pope before Innocent VIII—­paid for them to be “put into Latin for the general good of our faith,” in Pico’s words, “and now that he has passed away, three of them have come down to readers of Latin.” Sixtus had been pope for about ten years when Flavius Mithridates—­ still called Guglielmo Moncada—­came to Rome to work for Cardinal Cibò. A ­ fter the cardinal succeeded Sixtus as Innocent VIII, he condemned thirteen of Pico’s t­ heses, including the incendiary proposition on Kabbalah as proof of Christ’s divinity. Flavius had already alienated Cibò before he was pope, and ­later the experience may have led this pontiff to question Pico’s judgment when the prince hired Flavius to translate. When the convert preached before the assembled cardinals in 1481, with Sixtus presiding, he had used the occasion to promote his livelihood—­the teaching of languages—­especially the “Chaldean, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek” spoken in the world where Jesus lived.

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Figure 20. ​Ethiopic characters in a manuscript of the Oration, before 1494.

We cannot know (pending new evidence) which three books Pico meant when he thanked the pope in his speech. As the Vatican Library grew ­under Sixtus and Innocent, books in Semitic languages w ­ ere acquired and experts like Flavius ­were hired to copy, translate, and study them—­including books in the Ethiopic script that Flavius used to transliterate Hebrew and Aramaic in order to pass the results off as ‘Chaldean.’ In the Oration, an unidentified Persian named Evantes comments on ­human variability with a statement in this made-­to-­order language, written in exotic letters—­በረናሠ ሀ ሐያ ሚጠበዐ ሜሥታኔ ዌናዳደ ሜመሐለጰተ ጋረማሀ ኮ ወኮ—­which Pico translated as “man is a living ­thing whose nature is variable, manifold, and inconstant.” The Ethiopic characters come ­after the Latin words hinc illud Chaldaeorum in a partial manuscript of the speech (Figure 20). Although the strange words attracted the prince ­because they ­were bizarre, they could also have been practical tools for missionaries searching for Prester John—­proselytizers who might be helped by local Christians who spoke Syriac or Aramaic and could read Targums in ­those languages. Manuscripts of translations by Flavius from Aramaic and Hebrew now fill several fat volumes in the Vatican. Some of this could have been prepared a­ fter 1481, when Flavius came to Rome, but before he met Pico in 1486, and the prince may have acquired even more texts by hiring a team of translators. Other­wise, if only he and Flavius w ­ ere working together, the ­whole heap of writing had to pile up in the space of a single hectic year, more or less, produced by two p ­ eople.42



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“So scrupulously are ­these books revered by Jews of our time,” Pico explained, “that they permit no one ­under the age of forty to touch them.” Ancient rules prescribed age levels for a number of activities. In the Maxims of the ­Fathers, for example, which Pico owned, “five years is the age for studying scripture, ten for the study of Mishnah, thirteen for the obligation to observe the commandments, fifteen for the study of Talmud, eigh­teen for marriage, twenty to earn, thirty for strength, forty for understanding, fifty for counsel, sixty for sagacity, seventy for elderliness, eighty for power, ninety to stoop, and a hundred-­year-­old is like one who has died and passed away and been subtracted from the world.” The understanding (binah) attained at forty is also S3, the third highest Sefirah. Flavius confirmed that “forty for Understanding” applied to Kabbalah, and Pico identified S3 with the Holy Spirit. Moses fasted at Sinai for forty days and wandered in the wilderness for forty years: both ­trials ­were preparations for enlightenment. In this spirit, as the Zohar opens, Rabbi Hiyya must fast twice for forty days before seeing a vision of Rashbi studying in the Celestial Acad­emy.43 ­Because secrets held so closely w ­ ere seldom written down, the books of Kabbalah that Pico collected ­were expensive. “I bought them for myself at no small cost,” he recalled, “and read through them with the greatest attention.” The Apology confirms the high price of his Kabbalist library—­much of it translated by Flavius, who exploited his rich young patron’s search for Christian doctrines in Hebrew and Aramaic texts. As a converted Jew, Flavius had special standing to vouch for “a religion not so much Mosaic as Christian” in Kabbalah. His Latin versions sometimes gave Trinitarian clues missing in the originals—­not to say that no au­then­tic Kabbalist ever responded in this way, negatively or positively, to pressure from the Christian environment. Since the earliest Kabbalah was postclassical, reflections of Greco-­Roman thought also occur, although—­unlike Maimonides—­ some Kabbalists w ­ ere hostile to Greek philosophy. Nonetheless, Pico concluded that “where t­ hese books bear on philosophy, you might actually be hearing Pythagoras and Plato.” 44 The prince was ready to try his findings out on Jews who refused to convert: ­there is “hardly any point of contention,” he exclaimed, “on which ­these books by Kabbalists cannot defeat and rebut them.” Some items on his list of topics to dispute—­the Trinity, the Incarnation, Jesus as a divine Messiah—­ divided Christians from Jews. O ­ thers connected the two faiths of Abraham: atonement, ­orders of angels, and a heavenly Jerusalem. But Jews trapped in debate on t­ hese issues had ­little chance with grandees like the prince.

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Writing shortly ­after 1484, Ficino described ­earlier meetings at Pico’s ­ ouse in Florence that pitted Elia del M edigo and other Jews against h Flavius—­a renegade, in their view—­who claimed that the prophets foresaw the divinity of Jesus. Pico himself recalled one such demonstration hosted by a power­ful Venetian, Antonio Cronico or Vinciguerra: “At his h ­ ouse, with his own ears he heard the Hebrew Dattilo, a man of im­mense learning, ‘come over hand and foot’ to a thoroughly Christian position on the Trinity.” The identity of this Dattilo—­Joab in Hebrew, a c ommon name—is unknown.45 Since the shaming at Antonio’s ­house could have happened several years before the Oration was written, the author may not have remembered much when he claimed that Dattilo conceded the truth of the Trinity. This key Christian dogma was his next topic in the Conclusions ­after the typology of Kabbalah in the first three 2K ­theses. He started with the hidden God, the ’Eyn-­sof or No-­End, beyond the summit of the Sefirot at S1: T2K4 Ensoph ​is not to be numbered along with other Numerations ­because it is the unity of ­t hose Numerations, removed and uncommunicated, not a coordinated unity. T2K5 ​Any Hebrew Kabbalist, following princi­ples and statements of the knowledge of Kabbalah, is forced inevitably to grant precisely—­ without addition, subtraction, or variation—­what the Catholic faith of Christians declares about the Trinity and each divine person, F ­ ather, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Next, a corollary to T2K5 maintains that “­those who deny the Trinity . . . ​ can plainly be refuted if princi­ples of Kabbalah are accepted.” Then comes T2K7 to claim that “no Hebrew Kabbalist can deny that the name Jesus . . . ​ signifies . . . ​God, the Son of God, and the Wisdom of the ­Father united through the third person of the Deity (who is the hottest fire of Love) to h ­ uman nature.” 46 The message is obvious: Jewish theosophy conceals the Trinity, just as Proclus based a pagan theology on a metaphysics of triads. ­There are ten Sefirot, however, not three—­giving Pico room for at least three Trinities: S1, S2, and S3 at the top, undescended, and absolutely transcendent; S1, S6, and S10, reaching from top to bottom and descending t­ oward immanence; then S1, S9, and S10, fully descended. The ­Father would be S1 in all three configurations. But the Son, S2 in the undescended Trinity, would



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become S6 when descending or S9 when descended, with the Holy Spirit as S10 rather than S3 (see Figure 21). A Trinitarian Kabbalah—­ whose exact architecture remains Pico’s secret—­was his main doctrinal goal in the T2K ­theses. Hebrew names assigned to the Trinity in T2K6, for example, conFigure 21. ​Three Trinities in the Sefirot. nect the ­Father with S1, the Son with S6, and the Holy Spirit with S10. Another thesis confirms this arrangement with an oblique comment on God’s names as titles of Sefirot. T2K33 ​Through this term ‫איש‬, written with aleph, iod, and scin, and meaning man, which is applied to God in the phrase Man of War, we are given an absolutely complete reminder of the mystery of the Trinity through a method of Kabbalah.

In Exodus 15, God is a “Man of War,” and ‘Man’ is Ish (‫)איש‬. The Bahir told Pico that the letters—­alef, yod, shin—of Ish are S1, S2, and S3. Alef is also the first letter of Ehyeh, and yod is the first letter of yhw h—­names of the F ­ ather (S1) and Son (S6) in thesis T2K6, where the Spirit as Adonai is S10, not S3. But another name of S10 is Shabbat—­the Sabbath—­which begins with shin, and this matches the spelling of Ish with alef (S1), yod (S6), and shin (S10). On the surface, Pico’s thesis contradicted the Bahir by extending the Trinity beyond S3 to S6 and S10. Looking deeper, however, what the prince saw was not contradiction but completion, in a dif­fer­ent dimension, of one Trinitarian insight by o ­ thers.47 Such discoveries made him confident that books of Kabbalah told Jews—­a nd would tell Christians—­“about the mystery of the Trinity, about the incarnation of the Word, about the divinity of the Messiah, about original sin, its atonement through Christ, the heavenly Jerusalem, the fall of the demons, the ­orders of angels, about purgatory, and the pains of hell.” He found t­ hese doctrines in a new and arcane creed “revered by Jews” that could be turned against them to “do b ­ attle for religion.” 48

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3. ​ Oration VII, 69–72 But first, to prove he was ready for the fight, he had a speech to finish and an audience to convince. To close his Oration, ­a fter saying so much about Kabbalah, he added a few words about Orpheus and his Hymns as models for numerical mysteries that o ­ thers took to be nonsense (69). He brought this difficult topic up to show how hard he had worked to solve philosophy’s puzzles. Yet critics kept complaining that he talked too much about nothing (70). He replied that just one thesis—­about Plato and Aristotle agreeing—­could have justified many more. Nonetheless, he wanted to finish his prelude and start the opera. The real prob­lem was that o ­ thers w ­ ere ignorant, not that he was ambitious (71). So he urged the F ­ athers in Rome to let the dispute begin with the blast of a trumpet (72). ­After making his case for Kabbalah, the disputant was ready to “get back to listing the topics of my disputation.” But the Oration breaks the sequence of the Conclusions at this point, where 72 propositions on Kabbalah close the w ­ hole book. Having finished with Kabbalah in the speech, Pico turned back to “poems by Zoroaster and Orpheus” that he had already examined in the eighth and tenth sets of T2 t­ heses. The Platonists, ­great admirers of Zoroaster, had said enough about the Chaldean Oracles, so he moved on quickly to the Hymns of Orpheus, who taught a “secret doctrine of numbers . . . ​in the way of ancient theologians.” ­These poems ­were a “perspicuous model of Pythagorean arithmetic theology,” according to Iamblichus, not “ridicu­lous gibberish.” On the contrary, like books of Kabbalah, the Hymns ­were full of mystical mathe­ matics—­mysteries wrapped in myth, according to Pico. And yet, compared to Kabbalah, the Orphic writings ­were better known—at least by name and reputation—to his audience. He appealed to his judges with an implicit analogy: ­because Kabbalah was an ancient theology and no more enig­ athers in Rome owed Hebrew mysmatic than the Hymns, the Reverend F teries at least the same re­spect paid to heathen puzzles—­and they should thank the prince for sharing this insight.49 Iamblichus denied that the Hymns ­were “old wives’ tales.” ­People had misunderstood them—in Pico’s opinion—­only ­because the singer “wrapped his mysterious doctrines in folds of myth . . . ​­under a veil of poetry.” The Bible’s sacred poems, the Psalms, also needed deciphering: Pico’s comments on some of them survive. With the Psalms constantly on his mind



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as he wrote his speech, while also meditating on Orpheus as a pagan David, praise for Orphic poetry came easily to the prince. One reason to stop for Orpheus but skip Zoroaster was that the Hymns ­were “almost intact” in Greek, unlike the Oracles, which ­were “mutilated in that language, more complete in Chaldean.” Pico could not have known how t­ hese texts came to be as he found them. Even if he noticed the many dif­fer­ent teachings in Greek verse attributed to Orpheus, the textual particulars w ­ ere beyond his reach. The singer’s journey to the underworld was a mythic vehicle for religions of soul voyaging. Th ­ ere ­were other elaborate tales—­a lso called Orphic—­about a g od of Time who fathered a c osmos hatched from an egg. The figure known as Orpheus had acquired so much theological authority that Pico ranked him with Zoroaster among “­Fathers and found­ers of ancient wisdom.” Plato and his successors had trusted Orpheus as a guide to theogony, cosmogony, and soul travel, while also following his exploits in myths that made narratives out of the same doctrines—so they believed. The Orphic poetry that Pico found “almost intact” was written long ­after Plato died, however, in the second ­century CE or ­later. A few dozen hymns—­eighty-­ six was the count in Pico’s day—­praise the gods by names and attributes, ask help for predictable purposes, and sometimes sound like liturgies for a mystery religion. Ficino translated the Hymns but never let them be printed. He and Pico also knew material credited to Orpheus in Neoplatonic and Patristic texts, which showed other sides of the godlike singer.50 The “mutilated” Greek remains of Zoroaster w ­ ere fragments of verse from the same era, responding to the same religious needs that moved Plotinus and his students. Th ­ ese Oracles off ered theological solace and practical advice to spiritual seekers who wanted to ­free their souls from the body’s prison. The verses known to Pico ­were even more cryptic than the originals: not many survived in more than a few broken lines by the time they w ­ ere first collected in the West—­just a few years before he was born. Ficino used this collection, but the prince thought he had even better evidence. Writing excitedly to Ficino, who had loaned him a L atin Koran, the prince eff used about his pro­gress in Arabic, Chaldean, and Hebrew. He also described other books in t­ hose languages, “first of all oracles of Ezra, of Zoroaster and of Melchiar of the Magi, divulging what is mutilated and full of errors in the Greek so that one reads a full and correct version. ­There is also interpretation by Chaldean sages—­brief, to be sure, and uneven but full of mysteries—­a nd likewise a l­ ittle book on Chaldean theological

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doctrine, with a r ich and divine explanation by Persians, Greeks, and Chaldeans.” What ­were ­these books? Two passages reproduced in the Oration and called ‘Chaldean’ are peculiar—in their script (Ethiopic) and vocabulary (Hebrew mixed with Aramaic). Does the letter to Ficino suggest that Pico had seen the Oracles in some such polyglot form—­perhaps doctored or concocted by Flavius? Ancient material about Zoroaster survives in Syriac. One strand is hostile, identifying the prophet with a wicked Samaritan priest called Azaziel. A friendlier thread starts from the Gospel story of the Magi and from Avestan traditions about the Saosyant, a world redeemer born to a virgin: Zoroaster himself foretells the Messiah’s coming and transmits his prophecy to Magi, who pre­sent the infant Lord with gold, frankincense, and myrrh that Adam had stored in a cave. Infancy tales in Syriac spread the fame of the Magi, one of whom was called Melchior. Tales about Ezra, some in Syriac, also multiplied. When Pico told Ficino about “oracles of Ezra, of Zoroaster, and of Melchiar of the Magi,” he was thinking of such stories.51 Even if Pico actually read some of them, they added l­ ittle to his speech: he chose to “leave Zoroaster aside,” despite having proposed fifteen ­theses (Z) on “Zoroaster and his Chaldean expositors.” Six propositions (T2Z1–3, 6–7, 13) call ­these experts interpretes—­‘translators’ of Syriac or Aramaic into Greek, perhaps, or maybe into Hebrew or Arabic. If Pico saw old books that honored Zoroaster, he may also have seen o ­ thers that condemned him. The prophet was an inventor of magic—­a discovery with a dark side. When the prince praised him as a patriarch of good magic, he stipulated that this righ­teous sage was “not perhaps the one you think”—­not the criminal whose sorcery enslaves man to “God’s enemies.”52 ­After scarcely a glimpse at Zoroaster, Pico turned to Orpheus—­and got stuck in a hermeneutic bind. Neoplatonists studied Orphic texts mainly for theogony and eschatology—­not what the Hymns are about. But Pico knew this material from ­those same philosophers—­the Neoplatonists—­ who read the Hymns allegorically, as if they and e­ arlier Orphic myths had the same content. Ingenious interpretations meant to extract a s uitable theology from the Hymns peaked with Proclus. This phi­los­o­pher, also a mathematician, confirmed that the primal Orphic teaching was what Pico called a “secret doctrine of numbers.” A correct reading of the poems and their mystical mathe­matics, according to Proclus, ­will “reveal no genuine realities to the profane while showing only faint traces of the w ­ hole mystagogy . . . ​for a vision unavailable to ordinary p ­ eople.” A plain reading of



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the Hymns—­Pico’s primary Orphic source—­would never get at this sacred truth, and he could only conclude that their message was esoteric, like so much ancient wisdom in his Oration.53 The prince wanted recognition, nonetheless, for the “work I have done, the trou­ble I have faced in digging out meanings from a secret philosophy.” To get the credit due to him, why discuss Kabbalah first and only then examine the Hymns? It was Orphic wisdom—­not Kabbalah or the Chaldean Oracles—­that prompted this remark about the l­abor needed to excavate wisdom from “farfetched riddles and obscurities of myth.” But secrets in the Hymns, like many mysteries of Kabbalah, ­were numerical—­a “doctrine of numbers.” Why not make the same point about Kabbalah? Perhaps the Hymns seemed safer not just ­because they ­were better known but also ­because they w ­ ere not Jewish—­hence less threatening to Christians. Ready to end his speech, the speaker still worried about his critics and could not resist insulting them again—­enemies who kept sniping as if his many questions ­were not all momentous, his e­ very insight not original, each thought not so harmonized with all the rest that his Conclusions ­were the purest parsimony, packed so tight with meaning that dividing his topics more would have exploded them to infinity. Just the single task of “reconciling the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle could have led . . . ​to hundreds of t­ heses.” Listen: W ­ ere ­there no cheers for his stunning solutions to “prob­lems entirely unknown”? Had he not made dazzling discoveries “without aid or attention” from ­others? Hoping to charm his critics with sarcasm—­ “princes among phi­los­o­phers,” he called them—he took sole credit, in the face of envy, for tackling the hardest puzzles and finding original solutions. But he heard no shouts of gratitude: “­those dogs of mine have been barking,” too surly to appreciate the philosophical concord that he promised. Forced to suppress his modesty, Pico let his enemies in on his real reason for disputing: “to convince p ­ eople not so much that I know many ­things as that I know what many do not know.” ­After this final advertisement for himself, he turned to his hearers in the “Apostolic Senate,” the cardinals, for a twelfth and last time. Had they actually heard him give his speech, the ­Fathers in Rome may have been only too happy to answer the trumpet, calling them all to a ­battle that would not be the glorious fight expected by the prince.54

Conclusion

•

Real Picos and Why ἀe y M ­ atter

. . . ​a man you ­don’t meet ­every day. —­o l d g a e l i c s o n g

s o t h en : Is Pico still a Phoenix, as Poliziano said he was in 1489? If the

test is staying famous for five centuries, the prince has made the grade. And he’s in the ­running if Poliziano’s compliment was more about uniqueness than immortality: Pico’s gifts ­were unusual and his achievements remarkable. One breakthrough, an original and detailed refutation of astrology, is not a focus of this book, which concentrates on his magic and Kabbalah—an epochal innovation based on texts unreadable by all but a few Christians of his time. Although Pico denounced Jews while misappropriating this tradition, he also brought his Jewish teachers into a conversation with Chris­tian­ity that continues t­ oday. The inclusion was historic though not irenic and not about dignity.1 In the Oration mistakenly linked with that idea, Pico’s method was mystification—­from start to finish. What he wrote invited misunderstanding, even by ­people who read the ­whole speech, not just the first few pages. Far from celebrating the h ­ uman condition, he mapped a way out of it, and he kept most of the route to himself: Kabbalah, the last stop on his voyage, held the deepest secrets of the talk that he never gave in Rome. The prince’s celebrity was tied to the speech only a­ fter World War I, when Cassirer, Garin, and Gentile amplified a few sentences from Burckhardt to broadcast them as a G ospel According to Pico. They and their many, many readers accepted the usual title of the Oration as its meaning—­a meaning extracted from it by post-­Kantian interpreters. The orator’s quite dif­fer­ent aims ­were, in part, positive: to convince Christians that 451

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t­ here was a better way to be saved. The related task of bullying Jews into professing Christian dogma was an act of mercy by his lights—­but not by mine. When modern intellectuals in­ven­ted their own Oration on the Dignity ­ ere exceptions—­ of Man, they also meant well. But few—­Garin and Yates w gave credit to the Kabbalah in the speech and in the ­theses introduced by it. In 1994, five hundred years ­after the prince died, even Garin was still talking about his address “on the dignity of man” as a defining moment of the Re­nais­sance. Twenty years ­earlier, Wirszubski had assembled the evidence (but had not yet published much of it) that shows how dif­fer­ent the real Pico was from this plaster saint of modernity—­and of the humanism packaged in textbooks for college students in North Amer­i­ca.2 The textbooks have been vehicles for a pedagogy and an ideology born in the USA—­courses on ‘Western civilization’ as the core of ‘general education’ for college students. The general education movement in American higher education started at Columbia University in the wake of World War I. A year ­after Woodrow Wilson made a speech to declare the nation’s war aims—­famously distilled into Fourteen Points—­Columbia followed up in 1919 with a new course on “Con­temporary Civilization in the West.” If a president’s rationale for global conflict was ­going to make the world safe for democracy, Columbia gradu­ates would lead the way with a reasoned account, based on history, of their own culture: undergraduates called the course CC, they all had to enroll, and it reached deep into their university’s soul. ­After World War II, in 1946, Columbia University Press published the first edition of a book of readings to accompany the CC course—­An Introduction to Con­temporary Civilization in the West, whose first volume ends with the French Revolution. The book’s subject is the “making of con­ temporary civilization,” but the story told in its twelve chapters is wholly Eu­ro­pean. With the war barely over, Justus Buchler and his co-­editors still felt the shock of slaughter. Buchler—­a phi­los­o­pher who became a champion of civil liberties in the McCarthy era—­kept his eyes on “the United States and its place in international aff airs” while planning a separate volume on the “distinctively American contribution to con­temporary civilization.” Meanwhile his committee described the focus of their first proj­ect as “specifically Eu­ro­pean institutions and ideas which have helped to shape the character of con­temporary civilization.” “Oriental Civilization” followed soon, in 1950—as an elective.



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One of seven sections in a chapter on “Re­nais­sance moral attitudes” in the first CC textbook described Pico, along with Erasmus, Thomas More, and Petrarch. At that date—­when the United Nations had not yet declared itself on ­human dignity and the University of Chicago had not published ἀ e Re­nais­sance Philosophy of Man—­the Pico derided by Brucker and Voltaire was still tagged by the Columbia book with a “motley of contradictory ideas and a confused eclecticism.” The word ‘dignity’ appeared only to title a se­lection from the speech, not in the text or the headnote that intro­ ere not just a “colduces it. But CC students ­were told that Pico’s writings w lection of opinions” and that the “spirit of his outlook” was something more. A c loser look (with a b oost from Cassirer) would show them that “man’s glory is his ‘self-­transforming nature’ his inner restlessness, his chameleonlike capacity to mold himself endlessly.”3 Heading the list of Buchler’s helpers in the CC proj­ect was Jacques Barzun, by then on his way to eminence as a Columbia professor. Barzun had been a CC student in 1927, seven years ­after leaving France. He soon joined Columbia’s faculty, stayed for more than fifty years, and died in 2012, ­after living most of his life in Manhattan, where he flourished at the university, still titrating the decay of Western culture in his nineties. At the turn of the millennium, a book reviewer for the New York Times remembered him as “one of the leading lights of an exceptional generation of American intellectuals. Now ninety-­two and retired from teaching, he is no less the véritable Pic, as French students call t­ hose classmates who remind them of . . . ​ that young man of the Re­nais­sance.” 4 A genuine Pico: even now, to call someone un vrai Pic is high praise in France. The following interchange could be read (in French) on the Internet in 2017: un françois ​Why do we say that a learned person can be called, with a l­ ittle irony, a Pico della Mirandola? ­Every time it occurs to me to use this expression, it’s to express a point of admiration. I have g­ reat re­spect for t­ hese few ­people who have managed to grasp their era’s knowledge in its totality. une françoise ​He’s been one of my idols for a long time ­because he promotes an open philosophy embracing every­t hing that flows from the ­w ill to truth. The translator of Plato into Latin, an extraordinary scholar and passionate idealist, he absolutely refuses to be locked up in any single school of thought, and he tries to get all intellectual traditions to agree, seeking to reconcile Plato with Aristotle. He lived at the same time as

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Leonardo da Vinci, and I like to imagine them meeting, talking and shaking hands. Maybe Machiavelli was ­t here too! Together, but each in his own sphere, they valued only an unbounded search for universal knowledge.5

This Pico is progressive, if not explic­itly a herald of dignity. He, Leonardo, and Machiavelli: what a round of handshakes! Thanks to social media, his hopes for concord in philosophy endure, while his persona has blurred into Ficino’s—­the “translator of Plato into Latin.” Who could complain? So much attention for one of their stars should please experts on the Re­nais­sance. But what if a “Mirandola or Mirandolphus” turns out to be a physician from Lombardy who taught in Carthage and Damascus u ­ ntil he died at the age of 57? This is the first flicker of fame for the prince in La Gloire de l’Empire by Jean D’Ormesson. The subtitle of the En­glish version—­A Novel, a History—­tells the tale. The book is a tour de force of double-­dealing as high art in fictionalized history and historical fiction. Where or when the reader stands on any page—­even with the help of footnotes and an index—is delightfully hard to tell. A carefully fabricated past about an empire that never was leans on a semi-­concocted pre­sent in D’Ormesson’s fantasy, awarded a ­Grand Prix by the French Acad­emy. On its pages we meet Abel Gance, custodian of Napoleon’s cinematic glory: Gance also made a movie about the empire— as it happened, or never happened—­and about Alexis, who ruled t­ hose vast domains long ago in fictive glory. Gance’s rival was Sergei Eisenstein, peering at clouds in Mexico before shooting his own film about Alexis: ἀ under Over the Empire. At the same moment, to make a revolution on the same terrain, Emiliano Zapata was studying the Emperor Alexis as a leader of men. And Émile Bréhier had put the usual annals of philosophy aside to ponder Philocrates and Isidore, imperial counselors to this autocrat of an indeterminate empire—­the mighty Alexis. Away from the emperor and in a moment of peril, Philocrates was jailed and then set ­free. Within days the sage was dead, however, though not before “he rejoined Alexis. For centuries their meeting has been an inexhaustible theme for dissertations and public speeches. From Pico della Mirandola to the Jesuit schools of the Third Republic, it was the pons asinorum of examinations and debate, a commonplace of both secular and religious culture.” A ­ fter the emperor’s phi­los­o­pher found his leader and was killed, ­people wanted to know who did the deed. Alexis himself? Had he betrayed Philocrates, his teacher? Alexis was a cynic. Not Philocrates,



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however, who “found it difficult to accept the idea of truth and justice divided against themselves. . . . ​His scepticism was directed ­toward history rather than belief, circumstance rather than princi­ple.” D’Ormesson—­ narrator of his own history and the creator of Alexis and Philocrates—­ suggests that the phi­los­o­pher “died by m ­ istake.” At this crux in the story, Pico—­a memory wizard—is D’Ormesson’s emblem for a puzzle about fate, oratory, and wisdom that had started to “fade from the collective consciousness of schoolboys. Why should they remember Philocrates when they ­don’t remember anything at all?” 6 Why indeed? But if they forgot the phi­los­o­pher, and if their schools ­were in Italy, would the schoolboys ever forget Pico de Paperis? When a friend told me about this descendant of Pico, I garbled the name as Pico de Pauperis—­which would be an odd variant on ­grand Italian names like De Angelis and De Sanctis. Not the angelic or the saintly but the penniless would have been ancestors of a De Pauperis. A papero in Italian is a young goose, however, and a ­human papero is a know-­it-­a ll who ­doesn’t know much. But in Italy’s playland of Topolino (Mickey Mouse), Paperino is a blustering duck—­Donald when he quacks in En­glish. One of Paperino’s ­uncles is Pico de Paperis, whose (approximate) Anglophone analog is Ludwig von Drake. A website describes the omnisapient Italian bird: “When he was young he tried to get as many degrees as pos­si­ble in ­every field, . . . ​ covering almost the w ­ hole of h ­ uman knowledge (scibile umano). When a ­family member asks for advice, t­ here’s almost always a joke about having a degree in the subject that the relative asks about—or maybe even teaching it. His social skills sometimes seem weak, however, and he’s often portrayed as quite forgetful—­a ­little senile, perhaps.”7 Poor social skills and knowing-­it-­a ll—­this fits the script for our Phoe­ ere and ­there, in nix, whose learning was de omni scibili. He still turns up h web chats about Re­nais­sance worthies, in tales of a counterfeit empire, and in Don Paperino’s neighborhood—­Paperopolis, Disney real estate in the land of Dante (Figure 22). Ghosts of the Phoenix still haunt rooms on e­ very floor of the G ­ rand ­Hotel of Culture—­low, high, and in between. W ­ ill they roam t­ hose corridors a c­ entury from now? Maybe not, if w ­ hole cultures can become subliterate, which may be the ­future for Anglophonia. Would the world be better off without books, or at least some books—­gloomy Rus­sian novels, morose plays in Danish and Swedish, Italian and En­g lish epics about eternal torment? ­People in a b ookless ­f uture who could no longer read such

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masterpieces might be less thoughtful than their ancestors, and maybe not as pensive. Pico’s mood as he finished his speech was upbeat, however. Despite spasms of anxiety about his critics, he was not deeply worried: Let the trumpets sound and dispute begin! ­Today, who would want to debate him on his own terms? Even in his own day, no sane person who knew what he was up to would have taken him on. Figure 22. ​Pico de Paperis Reads a ­Family In vari­ous ways, moreover, Chronicle. much of the past, especially the distant past, is just as remote as this prince, especially when the rec­ords are in dead languages. The strangeness is where the value lies. From the remains of Pico’s l­abors, ­there’s nothing to be learned about ­human dignity, however, certainly not as we now use the word ‘dignity.’ But the prince can teach us about ­human failure and striving—­with the same evidence that kept his story alive before p ­ eople turned to his ideas (none to speak of) about dignitas. He was the first Christian who both­ered to learn enough about Kabbalah to give a u seful account of it—­and to hijack it for his own uses. A Christian of his day and age who cared about Jewish ideas and took big risks to study them: that’s remarkable! L ­ ater, he also warned against astrologers in a persuasive way: that’s exceptional too. And he did it all within ten years or so, living a life that should be no one’s model but might be a caution or an inspiration. Like Pascal and other prodigies, he lived with such intensity that p ­ eople have stayed fascinated by him. ­They’ve told his story over and over again—­ for dif­fer­ent reasons and in dif­fer­ent ways. The story has lasted ­because of its brevity and strangeness. He made himself notorious—­and notoriety was a kind of celebrity—at a time when celebrity was taking its modern form. We may even know what he looked like, though not exactly or for sure. We have no idea what Peter Abelard looked like, on the other hand, and his calamitous autobiography gives less to go on—in the way of a l ife story—­than the ­family hagiography about Pico by his nephew. The same



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holds for Augustine’s Confessions, more like a long prayer than an autobiography. And it was a play by Shakespeare, not a Life by Plutarch or Suetonius, that made every­one remember why the Ides of March was a bad day for Julius Caesar. The French Revolution had started by the time Samuel Johnson found his Boswell, nearly three centuries ­after Gianfrancesco memorialized his ­uncle. As a subject of biography, mainly a modern genre, Pico’s timing was excellent: his was one of the first well-­documented acts in the circus of modern fame—­despite trou­ble from an unsettled script. ­Will we keep telling his stories? If not, the loss is all ours—­losing a chance to learn about ourselves and ­others by seeing how dif­fer­ent this strange genius was from us and from most other ­people. Another way to lose would be to take stories about him at face value, by not asking why ­those who told and repeated and distorted them treated them and him as they did. Looking for a real Pico is worth the trou­ble: like the roving young man in the old Gaelic song, he’s a prince you d ­ on’t meet ­every day.8

appendix a

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Pico’s Oration

Bausi’s Latin text is the basis for this translation except in paragraphs 10 and 33, which adopt readings by Wirszubski that Bausi leaves in appendices and notes. Quotation marks are not used b­ ecause Pico rarely meant to quote a text, in our sense, even where he used or mentioned it: italics mark words or passages where Pico’s meaning depends crucially on his referring or alluding to a source or emphasizing the authority of an idea. Many of t­ hese sources and ideas are identified in this book, mainly in Chapters 11, 12, and 13.

An Oration by Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola and Concordia

(1) In Arab memorials, Most Reverend F ­ athers, I have read about Abdala, a Saracen: when asked what was the most astonishing sight to be seen on this stage of the world—so to speak—he answered that t­ here was nothing to see more astonishing than man. Supporting his opinion is that saying of Mercury: Man is a ­great miracle, Asclepius. (2) I was not satisfied—­thinking over the basis for t­ hese statements—­with claims often made for mankind’s outstanding nature: that among creatures man is a go-­between, the intimate of higher beings and ruler of ­those below; that he is an interpreter of Nature, having keen senses, a searching reason, and shining intelligence; that he is an interval between fixed eternity and flowing time and (as the Persians say) the bond—no, the wedding-­knot—of the world, a ­little lower than the angels, according to David. ­These reasons are ­great, to be sure, but they are not the chief reasons, ­those that would 459

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truly establish the height of astonishment as man’s due. Why should ­those angels and heaven’s blessed choirs not astonish us more? (3) At last I seem to have understood why man is the most fortunate of animals, why he deserves all the astonishment, and just what standing he has been given in the universal order to make him the envy not only of beasts but also of stars and hypercosmic minds—­a wonderful and unbelievable fact! And why not? For with good reason man is judged a g­ reat miracle and called a t ruly astonishing animal. Hear what this means, ­Fathers: in a spirit of generosity turn a kindly ear to this work of mine, and bear with me. (4) Our ­Father on high, God the master-­builder, had already applied laws of arcane Wisdom to construct this cosmic h ­ ouse that we see, this most majestic ­temple of divinity. The region above the heavens he had adorned with minds; he had enlivened the ethereal spheres with eternal souls; and with a motley multitude of animals he had filled up the waste and feculent parts of the world below. But when his work was done, the Artificer wanted someone to assess the reason for so g­ reat an undertaking, to love its beauty, to be astonished by its immensity. Therefore, ­after every­ thing was finished (as Moses and Timaeus testify), he gave thought at last to making man. (5) But in the archetypes t­ here was nothing from which he could fashion a new child, no riches in the trea­sury for a new son to inherit, no place anywhere on the benches of the All where this contemplator of a universe might sit. For all the places ­were full, ­every one allotted to its order—­high, ­middle, and low. And yet it was no part of a fatherly Power to fail exhausted in the last stage of breeding, no part of Wisdom to waver for want of counsel in a moment of need, no part of bountiful Love to force someone to condemn divine liberality in his own case and then praise it when o ­ thers ­were helped. So in the end the best Workman de­cided that he to whom nothing of his own could be given should share what­ever was reserved for e­ very other being. Therefore, he took man as a work with no distinct image, stationed him in the mid-­region of the world, and spoke t­ hese words to him. (6) No fixed seat, no special look, nor any par­tic­u­lar gift of your own have we given you, Adam, so that what seat, what look, what gifts you choose for yourself, ­t hose you may have and hold as you wish, according to your purpose. For o ­ thers, a definite nature is confined within laws that we have prescribed. With no strictures confining you, you w ­ ill



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determine that nature by your own choice, which is the authority u ­ nder which I have put you. I have set you up as the center of the world so that you ­will be better placed to survey what the world contains. And we have made you neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that on your own, as molder and maker, specially appointed to decide, you may shape yourself in the form that you prefer. You can sink back into lower forms that are beasts; from your own resolute spirit, you can be born again to higher forms that are divine.

(7) O the supreme generosity of God the F ­ ather! This is man’s supreme and astonishing good fortune, to whom it is given to have what he chooses, to be what he wants. From the moment of birth—­from the ­mother’s belly, as Lucilius says—­beasts bring with them what they ­will have. ­Either from the beginning or a ­little ­later, spirits above have been what they ­will be for all the eternities. In man at birth the ­Father has planted seeds of ­every kind and sprouts of ­every type of life, and if anyone cultivates them, they ­will grow and bear their fruit in him. If the seeds he tends are vegetal, the man ­will be a plant. If they are sensual, he w ­ ill grow into a beast. If they are rational, he ­will turn into a heavenly animal. If they are intellectual, he w ­ ill be an angel and a son of God. And if he is not contented with the lot of creatures and draws himself into the center of his own unity, becoming a spirit and one with God, this one who has been set above every­thing ­will stand ahead of them all and absolutely apart in the F ­ ather’s darkness. (8) Who would not be astonished at this chameleon of ours? Or who would be any more astonished at anything e­ lse? It was not wrong of the Athenian Asclepius to say that he is signified by Proteus in the mysteries, by reason of his shape-­shifting and self-­changing nature—­hence ­those metamorphoses solemnized by Hebrews and Pythagoreans. For with their more secret theology, Hebrews too sometimes transform the blessed Enoch into an angel of divinity, whom they call ‫מטטרון‬, and sometimes they change ­others into other divine powers. Pythagoreans transmute wicked ­people into beasts and, if Empedocles is to be believed, even into plants. Imitating them, Maumeth often used to say that whoever strays from divine law turns into a beast. And this is surely right: for it is not bark that makes a plant but a dull and unfeeling nature; not hide that makes a beast of burden but a brutish and sensual soul; not a s­ pherical body but right reason that makes a h eavenly orb; not removing the body but spiritual intelligence that makes an angel.

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(9) If you see a person who has surrendered to the belly, for example, snaking along the ground, what you see is a vegetable, not a ­human. If you see someone blinded by false enchantments of fantasy, like a v ictim of Calypso, charmed into scratching where it itches and enslaved by the senses, what you see is no h ­ uman but a beast. But if you find a phi­los­o­pher distinguishing every­thing by right reason, this is a p erson you should honor: this is a heavenly animal, not of the earth. And if you see a pure contemplator, unaware of the body, withdrawn to the mind’s sanctuary, this is an animal neither earthly nor heavenly—­a more majestic divinity cloaked in ­human flesh. (10) Is t­ here anyone who would not find man astonishing, then, the one that Sacred Scripture, Mosaic and Christian, rightly calls all flesh or sometimes ­every creature, seeing that he is the one who transforms, forges, and fashions himself with the look of all flesh, with ­every creature’s abilities? For this reason, when he explains the Chaldean theology, Evantes the Persian writes that man is born with no image of his own, that they are many, alien, and accidental. Hence that saying of the Chaldeans: በረናሠ ሀ ሐያ ሚጠበዐ ሜሥታኔ ዌናዳደ ሜመሐለጰተ ጋረማሀ ኮ ወኮ, which means that a man is a living ­thing whose nature is variable, manifold, and inconstant. (11) But what is my purpose in all this? To help us understand this point: once born into this condition of being what we want to be, we ­ought to take utmost care that this not be said against us, that while we ­were held in honor, we did not recognize that we became like stupid and unthinking beasts of burden. Better that other line from the prophet Asaph: You are gods and all sons of the Most High, telling us not to abuse the ­Father’s generosity at its most indulgent and turn the ­free choice that he granted us from a help into a harm. ­Because we are not content with middling ­things, let a holy ambition like Juno’s possess our spirit; let us climb for the heights, panting; and let us strive with all our might to reach them—­since we can do it if we ­will it. Let us scorn ­things of earth, let us despise ­those of heaven, and then, leaving ­behind what­ever belongs to the world, let us fly up to the hypercosmic court nearest the most exalted divinity. Th ­ ere, as the sacred mysteries say, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones hold the first places; since we cannot abide second place and cannot yield, let us be their rivals for rank and glory. Once we ­will it, in nothing ­shall we be their inferiors. (12) But what method ­shall we use, and how in the end ­shall we do it? Let us see what they do and what life they live. And if we live that life—as we can, in fact—we s­ hall have made our destiny equal to theirs.



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(13) A Seraph burns with the fire of love; a Cherub flashes with the brilliance of intelligence; a Throne stands steadfast in judgment. Thus, if ­after due deliberation we are bent on a life full of action and accept concern for lower t­ hings, we ­shall stand firm with the solidity of Thrones. If we have detached from active ­matters, we ­shall be engaged in the disengagement of contemplation as we reflect upon the Workman in the work and the work in the Workman, and we ­shall gleam with Cherubic light all about us. If in love we burn only for that Workman, in likeness to the Seraph we s­ hall suddenly blaze with his devouring fire. Above the Throne—­a just judge, in other words—­God sits to judge the ages. Above the Cherub—­the contemplator—he hovers and keeps him warm as if brooding over him. For the Spirit of the Lord is borne upon the w ­ aters—­those ­waters, I s ay, that are above the heavens, and they, according to Job, praise the Lord in daybreak hymns. One who is a Seraph—­a lover—is in God, and God is in him: or rather, he and God are one. (14) ­Great is the power of Thrones, and we attain it by judging, but the greatest exaltation, attained when we love, belongs to Seraphim. Yet how can anyone judge or love what is unknown? Moses loved the God whom he saw, and as judge over the ­people he administered the law which, as contemplator, he had already seen on the mountain. In between, then, the Cherub both prepares us with its light for Seraphic fire and in the same manner lights our way ­toward the judgment of Thrones. (15) This is the knot of primary minds, the order of Pallas, protector of contemplative philosophy. This we must first emulate and also seek and indeed embrace in order to be carried off from t­ here to the heights of love and then descend, well instructed and prepared for duties of action. But truly, if we are to form our lives on the model of the Cherubic life, it is worthwhile to keep before our eyes what that life is and what it is like—to have in readiness what ­those angels do and what their activities are. ­Because we mind the flesh and smell like dirt, however, we may not attain this on our own, so let us go to the ancient ­Fathers who can give us a sure and completely reliable account of ­matters that they are at ease with and are familiar to them. (16) Let us consult the apostle Paul, the chosen vessel, and ask what he saw the armies of Cherubim ­doing when he was raised to the third heaven. He w ­ ill answer without fail, while Dionysius interprets, that they are cleansed, then enlightened, and fi­nally completed. We too, then, emulating the Cherubic life on earth, checking emotional impulses with moral

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knowledge, dispelling the darkness of reason through dialectic, let us cleanse the soul by washing away the filth of ignorance and vice so that our emotions ­will not rage in fury nor reason ever go mad and foolish. Then let us bathe the soul, purified and well settled, with the light of natu­ral philosophy so that fi­nally we may complete it with knowledge of divinity. (17) Not to limit ourselves to our own ­people, let us consult the patriarch Jacob, whose gleaming image is carved in the Glory Seat. As he sleeps in the lower world and watches in the world above, this wisest of F ­ athers ­will warn us. But he ­will use a figure (­those sages used to do every­thing this way) to give us his warning: that a l adder reaches from the ground below to the summit of heaven, marked off in a series of many steps, with the Lord seated at the top, while up and down the ladder angels of contemplation take turns moving back and forth. Yet if we are to aspire to the angelic life and must keep d ­ oing the same, who (I ask) ­will be wicked enough to touch the Lord’s ladder with dirty feet or hands unclean? For the impure to touch the pure is sacrilege, as the mysteries teach. (18) What are ­these feet, then, and ­these hands? The foot of the soul, surely, is that utterly worthless part that leans on ­matter as on the dirt of the ground, a n utritive and feeding power, I m ean—­tinder for lust and mistress of voluptuary softness. As for the soul’s hands, why not call them its raging part that rushes into ­battle to defend the appetites, plundering in daylight and dust to snatch something and gorge on it while snoozing in the shade? ­These hands, ­these feet—­the ­whole sensual part where, so they say, the lure of the body hangs like a noose round the soul’s neck—­let us wash them in moral philosophy’s living ­waters lest we be turned away from the ladder, desecrated and defiled. (19) But if we want to join angels speeding up and down Jacob’s ladder, this washing w ­ ill not be enough u ­ nless we have first been instructed and well prepared to advance from rung to rung as the rites require, never leaving the way of the ladder to charge off on some alternate path. ­A fter we have completed this preparation through the art of speaking or reasoning, and now animated by a Cherubic spirit, philosophizing along the rungs of the ladder (or Nature), passing through all ­things from center to center, at one moment we ­will descend, using the power of Titans to tear the One, like Osiris, into many, while at another moment we ­w ill ascend, using the power of Phoebus to gather the manifold, like limbs of Osiris, into the One, u ­ ntil at last, resting in the bosom of the ­Father, who is above the ladder, we s­ hall be consumed in theological bliss.



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(20) Let us also question Job the just—­who made a covenant with the God of life before he began his own life—­about what God Almighty desired most of all in ­those hundreds of thousands who stand near him. His answer ­will surely be peace—in keeping with what one reads in his book, who ­ iddle order interprets the warnings makes peace on high. And since the m of the highest order for ­those below, it is the phi­los­o­pher Empedocles who should interpret for us the words of Job the theologian. As his poems show, the phi­los­o­pher uses strife and friendship—­war and peace—to symbolize for us the twofold nature sited in our souls, the one lifting us to the heavens above, the other plunging us down to hell. He laments in t­ hese poems about being driven like a m adman by strife and discord, cast into the depths and exiled from the gods. (21) Discord certainly takes many forms in us, ­Fathers: at home our fights are violent and inside us—­wars worse than civil. If we reject them, if we are to strive for a peace that lifts us so high that we ­will be set among the Lord’s exalted, only philosophy can calm us within and put a c omplete stop to t­ hese strug­gles. (22) At first this w ­ ill be moral philosophy: she w ­ ill check the wild excesses of the many-­formed beast, as well as the lion’s brawling, raging, and pride, if our man seeks only a truce from the ­enemy. Then, if we think better of it and want the security of perpetual peace for ourselves, morality w ­ ill come with generous answers to our prayers, and—­once both beasts have been killed like pigs at a sacrifice—­this philosophy w ­ ill ratify an inviolable covenant of the holiest peace between flesh and spirit. Dialectic ­will calm the turmoils of reason as it swings agitated between quarrels of oratory and quibbles of syllogistic. Natu­ral philosophy w ­ ill ­settle disputes and disagreements of opinion that come from all sides to worry, distract, and torment the restless soul. But it ­will calm us by also compelling us to remember that Nature was born of war, according to Heraclitus, which is why Homer called it contention. (23) From philosophy, therefore, we cannot get true rest and lasting peace; this is a gift from philosophy’s mistress—­from most holy theology—­and only hers to give. Philosophy ­will show us the way, keep us com­pany, and lead us to her. When she sees us far off , hastening ­toward her, come to me—­she ­will shout—­you who are weary with toil, and I ­will restore your strength. Come to me, and I ­will give you the peace that the world and Nature cannot supply. (24) Called so sweetly, invited so kindly, flying on winged feet like earthly Mercuries to the embrace of our most blessed m ­ other, we ­will take

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delight from the peace that we have longed for—­the holiest peace, the unbroken bond, the friendship of the single-­souled wherein all our spirits do not so much converge in the one Mind above e­ very mind as in some unsayable way emerge as absolutely one. This is the friendship that Pythagoreans say is the end of all philosophy. This is the peace that God makes on ­ ill high, which angels descending to earth have announced to men of good w so that through this peace ­these same men, ascending to heaven, might be made into angels. (25) Let us wish this peace for our friends, for our time, for ­every ­house we enter, let us wish it for our soul so that through it she might be made a house of God, and then—­after she has shaken off her filth through morals and dialectic, a­ fter she has fitted herself out in courtly splendor, or manifold philosophy, ­after she has decked the tops of her gates with garlands of theology—­the King of Glory may descend and, coming with the ­Father, make his dwelling with her. If she proves herself worthy of so ­great a guest—so vast is his mercy—­wearing a g olden garment like a w edding gown, clothed in the manifold variety of knowledge, she ­will now welcome the fair guest no longer as a guest but as a spouse. Wishing never to part from him, she ­will want to be parted from her ­people and from her own ­father’s ­house. Yes, and ever forgetful of herself, she w ­ ill wish to die in herself that she might live in her spouse, in whose sight the death of his saints is truly precious—­that death, I mean (if one should use death for life ­ oing philosophy. in its fullness), that sages have said one practices when d (26) Let us call on Moses himself, only a l­ ittle lower than the flowing plenty of sacrosanct and ineff able intelligence from which angels get drunk on their nectar. We who dwell in the body’s lonely wilderness, we s­ hall attend to this honored judge as he declares the laws to us: ­ ose who are unclean and still need moral teaching, let them dwell Th with the ­people outside the Tabernacle while they purify themselves in the open air like priests from ἀ essaly. ­Those who have put their conduct in order and are allowed in the sanctuary may still not touch the sacred articles but must first have done ser­v ice in dialectic and assist with the rites as philosophy’s diligent Levites. Once accepted in ­t hose ceremonies, in the philosophical priesthood they may first contemplate the many-­colored curtain, hung with stars, in God’s palace on high; next the heavenly candelabra ornamented with seven lights; and fi­nally the coverings of skin; ­until at last, having been received into the ­temple’s



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inner sanctum through the merits of an exalted theology, and with no image in between to veil the glory of the Godhead, they may enjoy it to the full.

This surely is what Moses commands and, in commanding, warns, rouses, and exhorts us, while we can, to plan our journey through philosophy to the heavenly glory that ­will come. (27) Yet in truth not only Mosaic and Christian mysteries but also the theology of the ancients show us the value as well as the benefits of ­those liberal arts that we have come to debate. What e­ lse might they mean, t­ hose stages observed in the secret rites of the Greeks by initiates who gained admittance to mysteries ­after first being purified by arts that we have called cleansing, so to speak: the moral and dialectical? What ­else can this be but interpreting Nature’s hidden part with philosophy? Then at last came that ἐποπτεία, that gazing upon divinity by the light of theology, to ­those thus prepared. Who would not want to be initiated in such rites? Putting all ­human ­things ­behind, scorning fortune’s goods, careless of the body’s welfare, who would not wish to dine with gods while still dwelling on earth and get the gift of immortality while still mortal, drunk on the nectar of eternity? Who would not wish to be so inspired by t­ hose Socratic frenzies sung by Plato in the Phaedrus that he would be carried off , rushing away from ­here—­from a world that lies in wickedness, that is—to take a quick trip on stroking wings and feet to the heavenly Jerusalem? (28) Let us be swept up, ­Fathers, swept up by Socratic frenzies that take us outside the mind, putting us and our minds in God! They ­will certainly sweep us up if we have first swept up what is in us. For if moral philosophy has tuned the forces of emotion and set them to harmonize with one another in due mea­sure and tranquil concord, and if reason has moved in cadence with dialectic, then, stirred by the frenzy of the Muses, our inward ears w ­ ill drink deep of the heavenly symphony. Next, as Bacchus leads the Muses while we philosophize and he shows us God’s invisible ­things in his mysteries—­Nature’s vis­i­ble signs—he ­will make us drunk on the flowing bounty of God’s h ­ ouse, where holiest theology ­will come to ensoul us with a double frenzy if, like Moses, we are faithful in all of this. (29) Lifted now to the topmost height of theology’s watchtower, looking out for all eternity and gazing up at primeval beauty without interruption—­at what is, what ­will be, and what has been—we s­ hall sing prophecies about them like Phoebus, and we ­shall be winged lovers of that beauty u ­ ntil at

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last, driven wild by desire with a l ove beyond telling and transported beyond ourselves like burning Seraphs, full of divine power, we ­shall be ourselves no longer, but s­ hall be Him, the very One who made us. (30) Apollo’s sacred names—if anyone searches out their meanings and hidden mysteries—­will show quite plainly that this god is no less a phi­los­ o­pher than a prophet. Since Ammonius has tracked this down, t­ here is no need now for me to investigate farther. But consider three Delphic maxims, ­Fathers, as just what they need who are about to move within the holiest and most majestic t­ emple of the true Apollo—­not the pretended one—­ the one who lights ­every soul that comes into this world. You ­will see that they warn us just to embrace with all our might the three-­part philosophy that we are now debating. In fact, the saying µηδὲν ἄγαν—­nothing in excess—­rightly prescribes a norm and rule for all virtues through a method of the mean presented by morality. Another saying, γνῶθι σεαυτόν—­know ­ hole of Nature, in which yourself—­summons and exhorts us to know the w man’s nature is an interval and, as it ­were, a coupling. One who actually knows himself also knows all t­ hings in himself, as Zoroaster first and then Plato in the Alcibiades have written. Fi­nally, enlightened by this knowledge through natu­ral philosophy, now close to God and saying εἶ—­you are—to him, with this theological greeting we address the true Apollo as a friend and hence happily. (31) Let us also consult the very wise Pythagoras, wise most of all ­because he never thought himself worthy to be called a wise man. His first rule is not to sit on the bushel—on the rational part, that is, by which the soul mea­sures, judges, and weighs every­thing—­lest we lose it by giving way to sluggish idleness and not taking care to stimulate and regulate it by the rule and practice of dialectic. Then he ­will show us by signs that two ­things especially are to be avoided, making w ­ ater while facing the sun and cutting our nails during a s acrifice. But a­ fter we have voided our e­ ager floods of overflowing plea­sure with morality, and a­ fter we have cut back the sharp edges of wrath and spines of animosity as if clipping our nails, then at last we may begin to join the rites—­those mysteries of Bacchus that I have mentioned—­and f­ ree ourselves for the contemplation of which the Sun is rightly called ­Father and Guide. (32) Lastly he w ­ ill warn us to feed the cock—to nourish our soul’s divine part, in other words, with knowledge of divinity as if with solid food and heavenly ambrosia. This is the cock whose sight the lion—­every earthly power, in other words—­fears and re­spects. This is the cock to which under-



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standing was given, as we read in Job. When this cock crows, the ­human who strays returns to his senses. This is the cock that times its daily round by the dim light of early dawn, when the morning stars give praise to God. This is the cock that the ­dying Socrates—­who hoped to join his spirit’s divinity to the divinity of a g reater world—­said that he owed to Aesculapius, physician of souls, once he was past all threat of illness. (33) Let us also review the memorials of the Chaldeans: we ­shall see (if one believes them) that a path to happiness lies open to mortals through the same arts. Chaldean translators write that one of Zoroaster’s sayings was that the soul has wings, and when her wings drop off , the soul falls headlong into the body, but she flies back to the gods when they grow again. His disciples asked him how to get souls that fly with well-­feathered wings: Drench your wings, he said, in the w ­ aters of life. Then they wanted to know where to look for the source of ­these ­waters, and he answered them with a parable (which was this person’s custom): God’s paradise is washed and watered by four rivers: drink w ­ aters from them that w ­ ill save you. The name of the one that comes from the north is ቄሥተ, which means ‘righ­teous’; the one that comes from the west is ኩጰሮነ, which signifies ‘atonement’; from the east comes ነሆራ, indicating ‘light’; and from the south comes ራሓማኗተ, which we can translate as ‘piety.’

(34) Attend to this, ­Fathers, and consider carefully what ­these doctrines of Zoroaster might mean. Surely they mean nothing e­ lse but to wash filth from our eyes with moral knowledge, as if with ­waters from the far west, and to align their vision and correct it with dialectic, as if with a straight-­ edge from the north. Then, by contemplating Nature, we may get our eyes used to bearing the light of truth while it is still faint, like the new Sun as it rises, so that ­later, through theological piety and the most sacred worship of God, we may, like ea­gles in the sky, bravely endure the Sun’s full brightness, blazing at noon. Th ­ ese, perhaps, are morning, noon, and eve­ning perceptions that David first sang about and Augustine explained more fully. This is the midday light that shines directly on the Seraphim to set them on fire and, with equal eff ect, light up the Cherubim. This is the country that old ­Father Abraham was always heading for, the place where unclean spirits have no place, as doctrines of Moors and Kabbalists teach. (35) And if it is lawful to disclose any part of the more secret mysteries, even darkly, consider this: ­after a s wift fall from heaven has injured our man’s head with dizziness, and (according to Jeremiah) ­after death has

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entered through the win­dows to afflict our heart and liver, we should call on Raphael, a h eavenly physician, to use morals and dialectic like healing drugs in order to f­ ree us. Once we have been restored to good health, Gabriel—­God’s strength—­will dwell within us, to lead us through Nature’s won­ders, pointing out God’s might and power all around us, and fi­nally handing us over to the high priest Michael, who w ­ ill bestow on us, a­ fter we have served our time in philosophy, the priesthood of theology, like a crown of precious gems. (36) ­These are reasons, Reverend ­Fathers, that have not just excited me to study philosophy but have forced me to it. To be sure, I would not need to make this point except to reply to t­ hose who make a habit of condemning the study of philosophy, especially in ­people of rank—or generally in ­those of some means. ­Today, in fact—so unlucky is our age—­any philosophizing at all brings contempt and abuse rather than honor and glory. This monstrous and deadly conviction, that no one or only a f ew should do philosophy, has possessed almost e­ very mind, as if it w ­ ere worth nothing for a careful hand and eye to examine the ­causes of t­ hings, Nature’s ways, the world’s structure, God’s purposes, and mysteries of heaven and earth—­ except to gain good ­will or turn a profit. This is how ­things are: what a pity! None are thought wise u ­ nless they trade on the pursuit of wisdom: we see the chaste Pallas—­who dwells among ­humans as a g ift from the gods—­ driven away with hoots and hisses, unloved and friendless u ­ nless she sells herself and then returns to her lover’s money-­box the ill-­gotten coin taken in cheap trade for her deflowered virginity. (37) I make all ­these charges—in ­great distress and with provocation—­ not against princes of this age but against phi­los­o­phers, since it is they who believe and proclaim that one should not philosophize ­because ­there is no pay for phi­los­o­phers, no profit. Apparently they do not realize that such talk by itself shows them not to be phi­los­o­phers and not to love knowledge of truth for its own sake, while they go on planning their w ­ hole lives for advantage and ambition. As for me, I ­shall go so far as to praise myself, and not to blush, on this account—­that I h ave never philosophized for any other reason but to do philosophy, nor have I sought or hoped for any other profit or product from my studies and my long hours except to develop my mind and know the truth that I have always chiefly desired. Of this I have always been so fond and so enamored that I have put aside all concern for private or public aff airs to give myself wholly to contemplative quiet, and thus far no complaints from the envious, no curses from enemies of wis-



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dom, have been able to deter me, nor s­ hall they in the f­ uture. Philosophy herself has taught me to trust my own conscience, not what o ­ thers think, and always to concern myself to avoid the evil that I might say or do, not the evil opinion of o ­ thers. (38) I have been far from unaware, Most Reverend F ­ athers—­you supporters of the liberal arts who with your august presence have chosen to honor this disputation of mine which w ­ ill follow—­that as welcome and pleasing as this is to all of you, it is just as irksome and off ensive to many ­others. And ­there are ­those, I realize, who have already damned my proj­ect and keep damning it u ­ nder many headings. So it is that good and holy actions leading to virtue have usually had as many critics sniping at them— or more, dare I say?—­than false and wicked acts that lead to vice. (39) ­There are some besides who do not accept this type of disputation at all, this practice of debating ideas in public: they insist that its point is to put learning on parade and make a display of cleverness, not to promote knowledge. ­Others do not ­really reject the sort of t­ hing I am d ­ oing. It is just my ­doing it that they do not accept at all, ­because, being barely twenty-­four years of age, I have dared to propose a disputation on sublime mysteries of Christian theology, on philosophy’s deepest prob­lems, and on teachings not yet recognized, and ­because I have dared off er to debate in the most populous of all cities, before the grandest gathering of the most learned ­people, in the Apostolic Senate. Still o ­ thers, allowing me to dispute, wish not to allow me to dispute 900 questions, misrepresenting what I h ave done as excessive, ambitious, and beyond my ability. (40) I w ould have yielded to t­ hese objections instantly had I b een so instructed by the philosophy that I profess, and now, even as I am instructed by it, I would not respond if I thought that the debate arranged for us ­were a pretext for squabbles and scraps. So in our thoughts let t­ here be no occasion for goading and vilifying, nor for the envy that is always absent from the divine choirs (as Plato writes), and let us inquire like friends about ­whether I should dispute and w ­ hether about so many questions. (41) First, to t­ hose who misrepresent this custom of disputing in public, I ­shall have ­little to say, since this fault—if it is deemed a fault—is not only all of yours to share with me, most eminent doctors, who have often done this duty with ­great honor and praise, but also Plato’s and Aristotle’s along with all the most acclaimed phi­los­o­phers of ­every age. To them it was absolutely certain that nothing made them more fit to gain the knowledge of truth that they sought than constant practice at disputation. Just as the

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body’s strength becomes more vigorous through physical exercise, the strength of the mind undoubtedly grows livelier and hardier in this gymnasium of ideas. When poets keep singing about the arms of Pallas or when Hebrews say that the iron of sages, ‫ברזל שלחכמים‬, is their symbol, I would have thought they w ­ ere giving us a s ign for contests just like this most honorable kind, which is absolutely necessary for acquiring wisdom. This may be why Chaldeans also find it desirable, in the geniture of one who is to be a phi­los­o­pher, that Mars should also look on Mercury in trine aspect, as if all philosophy would grow tired and drowsy if one w ­ ere to do away with t­ hese contests and clashes. (42) Against ­those who say I’m unfit for this duty, my plan of defense is truly more difficult. For if I s ay that I’m fit for it, I m ay seem given to immodesty and self-­regard, but if I c oncede that I’m not fit, I’ll appear thoughtless and reckless. See what a bind I find myself in, what a situation! Without being blamed, I cannot promise from my own resources the very ­thing that I cannot withhold, without being blamed. Perhaps I should also mention that saying of Job, ἀi s is the Spirit in men, and listen with Timothy: Let no one despise your youth. (43) But from my own conscience I ­will say this, and it is quite true: ­There is nothing ­grand or special about me. I have not denied being studious and fond of the liberal arts, perhaps, yet I do not call myself learned or ­ ecause pretend to be. So when I shouldered so g­ reat a burden, this was not b I was unaware of my weakness, but b ­ ecause I knew the peculiar nature of this kind of combat—­this contest of ideas: I k new that one wins by being beaten. Accordingly, even the most helpless person should not shirk such a fight; on the contrary, he should deliberately seek it, since what the loser gets from the winner is help, not harm, and ­after his loss he goes home the richer—­k nowing more—­and is better equipped to fight in the ­future. Encouraged by this hope, I have no fear of fighting so hard a ­battle against the strongest and swiftest—­weak soldier that I a m. If anyone is to judge ­whether it was rash of me to do so, would not the outcome of the b ­ attle be better proof than my age? (44) In the third place, it remains for me to reply to ­those who are off ended by the vast number of my propositions, as if this burden rested on ­ ere not I w ho w ­ ill carry it—­a lone—to the end, their shoulders, as if it w however heavy the l­abor. This is unseemly and overbearing, is it not, to set a limit to another’s enterprise and—as Cicero says—­to look for a h alf-­ measure in something that gets better by getting bigger? Having ventured so



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much, obviously I must fail or succeed. If I succeed, I do not see why what earns praise in ten questions should deserve blame even in 900. If I fail, ­those who hate me ­will have grounds to accuse me, and ­those who love me, to forgive. For a young man of slight talent and small learning to have lost in an eff ort so ­great and so grave ­will warrant p ­ ardon more than accusation. According to the poet, where strength is wanting, surely daring wins praise; for g­ reat deeds, just to have willed is enough.

(45) But if many in our day have imitated Gorgias of Leontini and have been praised for it, making it a practice to arrange disputations not just on 900 questions but on all questions in all the arts, why may I not dispute about topics that are many, yes, but a ­limited number on specific points, and do so without blame? This is excessive and ambitious, they say. But my contention is not just that it is not excessive. What I have done is necessary besides. The fact is that if they too would join me in thinking about how philosophy works, they would admit—­though not happily—­that the necessity is plain enough. (46) ­Those who are committed to any of the schools of philosophy—­ favoring Thomas or Scotus, for example, who are now so widely read—­ they indeed can test their learning by discussing just a few questions. But I have resolved to swear by no one’s teaching and extend my inquiry to all masters of philosophy, to examine e­ very scrap of paper and get to know all the schools. Therefore, b ­ ecause I must speak about all t­ hese phi­los­o­phers, defending no one’s dogma lest I seem bound to it while neglecting the rest, I have no choice—­even in making a few points about each philosopher—­ but to raise many questions about all of them together. Let no one condemn me if I go as a guest where a tempest takes me. In fact, all the ancients followed this rule: to skip no works without reading them as they examined writers of e­ very kind. This was especially true of Aristotle, whom Plato therefore called ἀναγνώστης or reader. To have confined oneself within a single Porch or Acad­emy is surely the mark of a na rrow mind. Only one who has already made friends with all phi­los­o­phers can have picked out what truly suits him from all of them. Add the fact that t­ here is something distinct about each and e­ very group, something not shared with ­others. (47) Let me start h ­ ere with our own p ­ eople, at the point where philosophy has fi­nally arrived. In John Scotus ­there is something lively and

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discerning, in Thomas something solid and balanced, something clean and precise in Giles, shrewd and sharp in Francis, venerable, capacious and ­grand in Albert, in Henry something always sublime and dignified—so it seems to me. Among the Arabs, Averroes is steady and unshaken, Avempace and Alpharabius serious and thoughtful, Avicenna godlike and Platonic. Among the Greeks philosophy is clear, on the ­whole, and in the first thinkers also pure. In Simplicius it is opulent and abundant, in Themistius elegant and parsimonious, in Alexander consistent and learned. Theophrastus works ­things out painstakingly, while Ammonius is uncomplicated and accessible. (48) And if you turn to Platonists—to list only a few—in Porphyry you ­will enjoy rich content and a complex piety; in Iamblichus you w ­ ill pay re­spects to a more secret philosophy and mysteries of barbarians; and in Plotinus you ­will find nothing par­tic­u­lar to amaze you ­because every­thing he off ers is altogether amazing, making the Platonists sweat to barely understand him ­because his indirect and learned language speaks divinely about the divine and about the ­human in terms far beyond ­human. The more recent Platonists I omit: Proclus, abounding in Asiatic fecundity, and ­those who followed him, Hermias, Damascius, Olympiodorus, and several ­others, in all of whom that special symbol of the Platonists—­τὸ θεῖον, the divine—­a lways gleams forth. (49) Beyond this, if ­there is any sect that attacks truer doctrines and mocks well-­meant thoughts with slander, this makes truth stronger, not weaker, like a flame that flares when fanned, stirred up, and not snuff ed out. (50) Moved by this reasoning, I have de­cided to put ideas of all sorts into play, not just ­those of one doctrine (as some would prefer), so that—­after many sects have been compared and philosophies of many kinds discussed—­the flash of truth that Plato mentions in the Letters ­will light up our minds and clarify them, like the Sun rising from the deep. If we dealt only with philosophy by Latins—­Albert, Thomas, Scotus, Giles, Francis, and Henry—­and left out philosophies by Greeks and Arabs, what good would it do, seeing that all wisdom came from barbarians to Greeks and from Greeks to us? For this reason, our own p ­ eople have always thought it enough in their method of philosophizing to stand on what strangers have found and to improve what came from elsewhere. Why study Nature with Peripatetics without also summoning Platonists from the Acad­emy? Their theological doctrine, according to Augustine, was always considered the holiest of all philosophies, and now for the first time,



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a­ fter many centuries—as far as I know, begrudging no one—­I have brought it forward for public scrutiny through disputation. (51) But why discuss the views of so many ­others and—­like coming empty-­handed to a b anquet of sages—­contribute nothing of one’s own, nothing born of one’s own talent and nurtured by it? Surely it is beneath us, as Seneca says, to take wisdom only from textbooks and bring forth nothing of our own that suggests the truth at least remotely, even while giving no proof, as if ancestral discoveries blocked the way to our own enterprise and Nature’s force w ­ ere spent in us. If the farmer hates sterility in his field and the husband in his wife, surely all the greater ­will be the hatred of the divine Mind when joined and commingled with an infertile soul, for the child desired is nobler by far. (52) For this reason I am not content to have added, beyond the usual doctrines, much about the ancient theology of Mercurius Trismegistus, much from teachings of Chaldeans and Pythagoras, much from more secret mysteries of Hebrews. I h ave also proposed for disputation many ­things that I have discovered and devised on topics natu­ral and divine. (53) To begin, I have proposed the concord between Plato and Aristotle that many have accepted before now but no one has managed to prove. Among the Latins, Boethius promised to do it, but no one has found that he ever did what he always wanted. Among the Greeks, Simplicius announced the same plan, and would that he had produced as much as he pledged. In his Academics, Augustine also writes that many, using the most sophisticated arguments, tried to show the same t­ hing—­namely, that Plato’s philosophy and Aristotle’s are the same. Likewise John the Grammarian: he says that Plato disagrees with Aristotle only for t­ hose who fail to understand what Plato said—­though John left the proof for posterity to supply. I have also added several passages in which I assert that statements by Scotus and Thomas, by Averroes and Avicenna, agree in several places where they are thought to disagree. (54) Next, having thought deeply about Aristotle’s philosophy as well as Plato’s, I t hen put together seventy-­two novel teachings in physics and metaphysics, and—­unless I’ve made a ­mistake that ­will soon be obvious to me—­anyone who masters them w ­ ill be able to solve any prob­lem posed about nature or divinity by using a method far dif­fer­ent from the philosophy taught to us, the one read in schools and respected by teachers in our time. F ­ athers, in my early years—at a tender age when, as some would have it, one can barely read works by ­others—­I have chosen to put forward a

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new philosophy, which should give rise not so much to amazement as to praise, if I can defend it, or to condemnation, if it is rejected. In the end, when p ­ eople judge my discoveries and ­these writings of mine, what should count is their merits or defects—­not the author’s age. (55) Beyond what I have mentioned so far, t­ here is another novel method that philosophizes with numbers; in fact, the ancient theologians used it in antiquity—­Pythagoras especially, as well as Aglaophamus, Philalaos, Plato, and the ­earlier Platonists. But it withered away when our ­later age neglected it, along with many other brilliant achievements, and in our time one finds hardly a trace of it. Plato writes in the Epinomis that among all the liberal arts and the sciences of contemplation, the supreme and preeminently divine science is that of numbering. When he asks why man is the wisest animal, his answer is that he knows how to count, a remark that Aristotle also recalls in the Prob­lems. Abumasar writes that Avenzoar of Babylon used to say that a person who knows numbers knows every­thing. ­There could be no truth at all in this if by the art of numbering they meant the technique in which merchants are now the ­great experts, for Plato also testifies and loudly warns us not to understand this divine arithmetic as the arithmetic of commerce. Of this much esteemed arithmetic, then, I a m ready to make a trial, having spent long hours exploring it to my own satisfaction. And I h ave promised to use numbers in replying publicly to seventy-­four questions considered fundamental for divine and natu­ral knowledge. (56) I have also proposed theorems about magic, taking the word magic in two senses. One, which relies entirely on the activity and authority of demons, is a monstrous and accursed t­ hing—as God is my witness. The other, when well investigated, is nothing more than the final realization of natu­ral philosophy. Although the Greeks mention both, they call the former γοητεία, never dignifying it with the word magic, whereas for the latter they use µαγεία, the special name suited to it as the highest and perfect wisdom. In the Persian tongue, as Porphyry says, the word magus means the same t­ hing as our interpreter or worshipper of the divine. (57) But between ­these arts is a ­great—no, ­Fathers, the very greatest—­ difference and disparity. Not only the Christian religion but all laws and ­every well-­ordered state condemn and curse the former. All sages, all nations that study the heavenly and divine, approve and embrace the latter. One is the most dishonest of arts, the other a higher and holier philosophy; one is hollow and useless, the other solid, strong, and reliable. Whoever



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practiced the one has always concealed it ­because it would bring disgrace and abuse on the person who tried it; from the other, ever since antiquity, ­people have almost always sought g­ reat fame and cultural distinction. No phi­los­o­pher wishing to learn the liberal arts was ever a student of the former; for the latter, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, and Plato traveled abroad, preached it when they returned, and gave it a high place in their secrets. No arguments support the former, and no competent authorities approve it. The latter, ennobled somehow by eminent parents, has two authors especially: Xamolsis, whom Abbaris from the Far North imitated, and Zoroaster—­not perhaps the one you think, but the famous son of Oromasus. (58) If we question Plato about the magic of ­these two sages, he ­will answer in the Alcibiades that Zoroaster’s magic is nothing but the knowledge of divinity that Persian kings taught their sons so that they might learn to rule their commonwealth on the model of the cosmic commonwealth. He w ­ ill answer in the Charmides that the magic of Xamolsis is medicine for the mind and that it makes the mind temperate just as medicine makes the body healthy. Carondas, Damigeron, Apollonius, Hostanes, and Dardanus ­later stayed on their trail. Homer too kept up with it, concealing magic—­a long with all other kinds of wisdom—­under the wanderings of his Ulysses, as I s­ hall prove someday in my poetic theology. Eudoxus and Hermippus also kept it ­going, like almost all who have made a thorough study of Pythagorean and Platonic mysteries. Among more recent authorities, I also find three who had picked up the scent of magic: Alkindi the Arab, Roger Bacon, and William of Paris. (59) Plotinus also mentions it where he shows that the magus is Nature’s minister, not her Artificer. This man of the loftiest wisdom approves and confirms the one magic and abhors the other, so that, when he was summoned to rites of evil demons, he said it was better that they should come to him than he to them. And rightly so: for as the one magic exposes and enslaves man to unclean powers, the other makes him their lord and prince. (60) In the end, one magic cannot claim the name of art or science, whereas the other is full of the deepest mysteries, including the most profound contemplation of the most abstruse secrets and leading at last to knowledge of Nature as a ­whole. Not so much by working won­ders as by diligently serving Nature as she works them, this other magic calls out of hiding into the light powers sown by a gracious God and scattered over the

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world. A ­ fter probing deep into that universal accord that the Greeks more tellingly call συµπάθεια, a­ fter examining how natures are kin to one another, and applying to each and e­ very t­ hing its inborn charms—­named ἴυγγες by the Magi—­this magic makes public, as if it ­were the Artificer, won­ders concealed in the world’s secret parts, in Nature’s heart, in God’s hideaways and storerooms, and, as a farmer marries elm to vine, so a magus joins earth to heaven, linking t­ hings below to properties and powers of t­ hose above. (61) So it is that this magic is as divine and helpful as the other is dreadful and harmful, for this reason especially: that the other leads man away from God by enslaving him to God’s enemies, while this one excites man to that astonishment at God’s works whose absolutely certain eff ects are hope, faith, and a love that is always willing. For ­there is no greater stimulus to religion or to any worship of God than constantly contemplating God’s marvels. ­After exploring them carefully through this natu­ral magic of which I speak, we ­shall be stirred to love and to worship their Creator with a hotter passion, and then we s­ hall be forced to sing that famous song: Full are the heavens, full is the ­whole earth with your glory’s greatness. (62) And this is enough about magic: I h ave made t­ hese statements about it b ­ ecause I know t­ here are many who—as dogs always bark at t­ hose unknown to them—­a lso often denounce and detest what they do not understand. (63) I come now to what I have unearthed from ancient mysteries of the Jews and have brought forward to confirm the most holy and Catholic faith. So that p ­ eople who know nothing about t­ hese mysteries might not mistakenly regard them as fallacious nonsense or fabulous conjurations, I want every­one to understand what they are, what their features are, where they come from, who has confirmed them and on what eminent authority, how remote they are, how divine, and how much our p ­ eople need them to do ­battle for religion against savage slanders by Jews. (64) Not only famous teachers of the Jews but also our Esdras, Hilary, and Origen write that what God gave Moses on the mountain was not just the Law that he recorded for posterity in five books but also a t rue and more secret reading of the Law. God’s command to Moses was indeed to make the Law public to the ­people but not to divulge the interpretation of the Law or write it down. Moses was to reveal it only to Jesus Nave, and he in turn to the high priests who succeeded him, ­under a strict rule of silence. From the ­simple story ­there was enough to recognize God’s power ­here,



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t­ here his wrath at the wicked, his mercy to the good, his justice to all, and from the divine and saving commandments t­ here was enough to learn how to live a good and holy life and to worship in the true religion. But to disclose more secret mysteries to ­people, arcana of supreme divinity concealed beneath the bark of the Law and rough surface of its words, what would that be but to give something holy to dogs and cast pearls before swine? Hence it was a ­matter of divine command, not ­human judgment, to keep secret from the populace what should be told to the perfect—­the only ones with whom Paul says that he speaks about Wisdom. (65) Ancient phi­los­o­phers observed this custom scrupulously. Pythagoras wrote only a few ­little phrases that he trusted to his ­daughter Dama as he died. Sphinxes carved on t­ emples in Egypt used to give this warning—­ that intricate riddles w ­ ere to keep mystic dogmas safe from the common crowd. Plato, writing to Dionysius about the highest beings, says I must speak in riddles so that no one ­else may understand what I write you, in case my letter falls into another’s hands. Aristotle used to say that the books of the Metaphysics that deal with theology ­were published and not published. What more to add? Origen claims that the master of life, Jesus Christ, revealed much to his disciples that they de­cided not to write down in order to keep it from becoming common knowledge. Dionysius the Areopagite confirms this better than anyone: he says that the found­ers of our religion transmitted the more secret mysteries ἐκ νοὸς εἰς νοῦν διὰ µέσου λόγου, σωµατικοῦ µὲν, ἀυλότέρου δὲ ὅµως, γραφῆς εκτὸς—­from mind to mind, without writing, and only speech mediating between them. (66) B ­ ecause that true interpretation of the Law divinely bestowed on Moses was revealed by God’s command in just the same way, it was called Kabbalah, which is the Hebrew word for our reception; this is ­because one person would receive that teaching from another not through written rec­ ords but from a regular succession of revelations, as if by a law of inheritance. But a­ fter Cyrus brought the Jews back from captivity in Babylon and the ­Temple was restored ­under Zorobabel, they turned their attention to recovering the Law. Once Esdras, then the leader of the Assembly, had corrected the book of Moses, he saw clearly that a­ fter exiles, massacres, escapes, and the captivity of the p ­ eople of Israel, the custom of passing the Law from person to person could not be kept as the elders had established it. He also realized that secrets of heavenly doctrine divinely granted to them would perish, b ­ ecause the memory of them could last no longer without the support of written texts. So Esdras arranged for sages who then

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survived to be called together and for each to contribute what he remembered of the mysteries of the Law, and scribes ­were brought in to compile ­these contributions in 70 volumes (for that was roughly the number of sages in the Sanhedrin). (67) In this m ­ atter, F ­ athers, no need to trust my word alone. Hear what Esdras himself has to say: ­ fter 40 days had passed, the Most High spoke, saying, make public A what you have written first, let the righ­teous and unrigh­teous read, but the 70 most recent books you ­shall hold back to pass them on to sages of your p­ eople. For in them is a vein of intellect and a spring of wisdom and a stream of knowledge. And so I have done it.

­ ese are the exact words of Esdras. Th Th ­ ese are books on the knowledge of Kabbalah. Esdras was right to declare, before anyone and in a voice of singular clarity, that in ­these books ­there is a vein of intellect, or an ineff able theology of supersubstantial divinity; a spring of wisdom, or a c omplete metaphysics of intelligible and angelic forms; and a stream of knowledge, or a most certain philosophy of Nature. The Supreme Pontiff , Sixtus IV, who ruled just before Pope Innocent VIII, ­under whom we are fortunate to live, saw to it with ­great care and diligence that ­these books ­were put into Latin for the general good of our faith. And now that he has passed away, three of them have come down to readers of Latin. (68) So scrupulously are ­these books revered by Jews of our time that they permit no one u ­ nder the age of forty to touch them. A ­ fter I bought them for myself at no small cost and have read through them with the greatest attention and unremitting ­labor, I have seen in them—so help me God—­a religion not so much Mosaic as Christian. ­There I have read about the mystery of the Trinity, about the incarnation of the Word, about the divinity of the Messiah, about original sin, its atonement through Christ, the heavenly Jerusalem, the fall of the demons, the o ­ rders of angels, about purgatory and the pains of hell, reading the same t­ hings we read e­ very day in Paul and Dionysius, in Jerome and Augustine. But where t­ hese books bear on philosophy, you might actually be hearing Pythagoras and Plato, whose teachings are so closely related to the Christian faith that our Augustine gives ­great thanks to God ­because books by the Platonists came into his hands. All in all, t­ here is hardly any point of contention between us and the Jews on which t­ hese books by Kabbalists cannot defeat and rebut them, leaving them no corner to hide in. I have a most impressive



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witness to this fact in Antonio Cronico, a man of im­mense learning. When I was dining at his h ­ ouse, with his own ears he heard Dattilo, a Jew skilled in this science, come over hand and foot to a thoroughly Christian position on the Trinity. (69) But to get back to listing the topics of my disputation, I have also added my views on interpreting poems by Orpheus and Zoroaster. In Greek one reads Orpheus almost intact, but Zoroaster is mutilated in that language, more complete in Chaldean. Both are thought to be F ­ athers and found­ers of ancient wisdom. Now to leave Zoroaster aside—­given that Platonists speak of him frequently and always with the greatest reverence—­ Iamblichus of Chalcis writes that Pythagoras treated Orphic theology as a model for forming and fashioning his own philosophy. Indeed, they claim that sayings of Pythagoras ­were called sacred only for this reason—­because they came from the teachings of Orpheus whence, as from a primal spring, flowed a secret doctrine of numbers and anything of the g­ reat and sublime that Greek philosophy possessed. Orpheus, however, wrapped his mysterious doctrines in folds of myth—in the way of ancient theologians—­ concealing them so well ­under a veil of poetry that anyone who reads his Hymns would think t­ here was nothing beneath them but fables and the purest nonsense. (70) I have de­cided to mention this so that ­people would recognize the work I have done, the trou­ble I have faced in digging out meanings from a secret philosophy hidden in weeds of farfetched riddles and obscurities of myth, especially b ­ ecause, in a ­matter so serious, so recondite, and so unexplored, I have done this without aid or attention from other interpreters. And still ­those dogs of mine have been barking and complaining that I have piled up petty trivialities to make a show of quantity, as if all my questions w ­ ere not t­ hose most doubted and debated, t­ hose that have ­great academies crossing swords, as if I had not brought them—­t hose who pick at me and think themselves princes among philosophers—­prob­lems entirely unknown and untried. (71) So far am I from being guilty as charged, in fact, I have taken care to confine my disputation to as few topics as I could. Had I wanted to do as ­others do, had I divided my disputation and torn it into pieces, their number would quickly have become numberless. Also, letting other t­ hings pass, does not every­one know that just one proposition of the 900, the one about reconciling the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, could have led me—­beyond any suspicion of deliberately piling the numbers up—to

482

Appendix A

propose hundreds of ­theses, not to say more, if I had worked point by point through ­those issues where ­others find discord but I find harmony? But certainly—­even though it is immodest and not my manner, I s­ hall say it; I ­shall say it ­because the envious force me, the malicious force me to say it—­ certainly by arranging this meeting of mine I h ave wished to convince ­people not so much that I know many ­things as that I know what many do not know. (72) And now, Most Reverend F ­ athers, to put the facts before you, to let my oratory no longer delay what you want, most excellent doctors, as I watch you—­and greatly enjoy the moment—­while you await the fight, prepared and girded for it, now let us give ­battle, for this is the hour of our ­great good fortune, and the trumpet calls.

appendix b

•

Content of Pico’s 900 Conclusions

Pico planned two groups of ­theses, 400 (T1) and 500 (T2), for a total of 900. ­Because the t­ heses w ­ ere not numbered in the 1486 edition, keeping track of them while putting the book into print must have been difficult. In the ­table that follows, the fourth column gives the number of t­ heses stated in the heading of each set of ­theses (39 in all) in 1486. The 1532 edition numbers ­every thesis, not counting the 11 corollaries (c): the fifth column counts the ­theses numbered in 1532. Although 901 is the total count of what is stated in 1486, 900 ­theses are numbered in the 1532 edition—­ despite an error of “l x xi” for “l x xii” in the heading of the last set. Symbols for each set of ­theses are in the second column. Accordingly, the first thesis regarding Albert the ­Great is T1A1, the eleventh thesis regarding Thomas Aquinas is T1Aq11, the thirtieth thesis regarding Plato is T2Pla30, and so on. Symbols for the first thirteen t­ heses condemned in 1487 are in boldface. Translations are from the first edition of 1486.

483

T Group

ἀ ­ eses Stated 1486

ἀ ­ eses Numbered 1532

Symbol

Name

 1

1

A

Albert the ­Great

16

16

 2

1

Aq

Thomas Aquinas

45

45 (1c)

 3

1

F

Francis of Meyronnes

 4

1

S

 5

1

H

 6

1

 7  8

8

8

John Duns Scotus

22

22

Henry of Ghent

13

13

G

Giles of Rome

11

11

1

Avr

Averroes

41

41 (1c)

1

Avi

Avicenna

12

12

 9

1

Alf

Alfarabi

11

11

10

1

Isa

Isaac of Narbonne

4

4

11

1

Abu

Abumaron

4

4

12

1

Mm

Maimonides

3

3

13

1

Mot

Mohammed of Toledo

5

4

14

1

Ave

Avempace

2

2

15

1

ἀp

Theophrastus

4

4

16

1

Amm

Ammonius

3

3

17

1

Sm

Simplicius

9

9

18

1

Alx

Alexander

8

8

19

1

ἀm

Themistius

5

5

20

1

Plo

Plotinus

15

15

21

1

Adl

Adelandus

8

8

22

1

Prp

Porphyry

12

12

23

1

Imb

Iamblichus

9

9

24

1

Prc

Proclus

55

55

25

1

Py

Pythagoras

14

14

26

1

Chl

Chaldeans

27

1

Mtr

Mercurius Trismegistus

10

10 (1c)

28

1

K

Kabbalists

47

47

6

6

29

2

Ur

Unusual Reconciling

17

17

30

2

Ds

Dissenting

80

80 (2c)

31

2

Ud

Unusual New

71

71 (2c)

32

2

ἀe

Theological

31

29 (3c)

33

2

Pla

Plato

62

62 (1c)

34

2

Bc

Book of ­Causes

0

10

35

2

Mth

Mathe­matics

85

85

36

2

Z

Zoroaster

15

15

37

2

M

Magic

26

26

38

2

Or

Orphic Hymns

31

31

39

2

K

Kabbalah

71

72

appendix c

•

Se­lections from Pico’s 900 Conclusions

1

First Notice Giovanni Pico della Mirandola ­will dispute his own views in public—as well as ­those of Chaldeans, Arabs, Hebrews, Greeks, Egyptians, and Latins—­ about the statements listed, numbering nine hundred, about dialectical, moral, natu­ral, mathematical, metaphysical, theological, magical, and Kabbalist topics. In stating them, he has imitated not the splendid Roman tongue but the way the most famous disputants talk in Paris, b ­ ecause this is the custom of almost all phi­los­o­phers in our day. Propositions to be disputed are stated separately for nations and heads of sects, though without distinction for parts of philosophy—­all mixed together in an assortment. Conclusions regarding the teaching of Latin phi­los­o­phers and theologians: Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, John Scotus, Giles of Rome, and Francis of Meyronnes. 2

Conclusions 11 in Number Regarding Giles of Rome 1G5 ​Angels ­were not created with grace. 1G6 ​This is why an angel is stubborn and unrepentant—­because certain divine instincts ­were taken away from it. 1G7 ​A higher angel illuminates a lower one not by showing it a luminous object or by dividing what is united in itself and making it par­tic­u­lar but ­because it gives comfort to the intellect of the one below and makes it strong. 485

486

Appendix C

3

Conclusions 41 in Number Regarding Averroes Avr2 ​In all ­humans ­there is a single intellective soul. Avr3 ​Supreme h ­ uman happiness comes when the Agent Intellect connects with a potential intellect as its form; other Latin writers that I have read have interpreted that continuation wrongly and perversely, and especially John of Jandun, who on nearly all points of philosophy has completely corrupted and distorted the teaching of Averroes. Avr4 ​While holding the unity of the Intellect, it is pos­si­ble that ­after death my soul remains so particularly mine that I do not share it with every­one. 4

Conclusions 5 in Number Regarding Themistius ἀm 2 ​I believe the Agent Intellect that only illuminates to be in Themistius what Metatron is in Kabbalah. 5

Conclusions 15 in Number Regarding Plotinus Plo7 ​­Human happiness is supreme when our par­tic­u­lar intellect is fully and wholly conjoined with the First Intellect. Plo8 ​Civic virtues are not to be called virtues without qualification. 6

Conclusions 55 in Number Regarding Proclus Prc7 ​By the one and many, ­whole and parts, bounded and unbounded that we get from the Parmenides, understand a second group of the trinity as intelligibles intellected by dividing that group into three. Prc9 ​Plato represents a third group of the second trinity with three bound­ aries—­the extremes, the completed, and the figured. Prc13 ​The second trinity of the intellected hebdomad is the trinity of Curetes called undefiled by the ἀ eology.



Appendix C

487

Prc21 ​It befits hypercosmic gods to resemble what exists and to pass on that mutual sympathy and sharing that they get from resembling one another. Prc22 ​Although this resembling befits the guiding gods described in the previous conclusion, it w ­ ill still befit the ­middle group of their trinity ­because the first group has conjoined directly and by substance with intellected gods and a third blends in with the next kinds. Prc24 ​The Jupiter in the guiding trinity is substantivated, the Neptune is vivified, and the Pluto reverts. ­ hole trinity of hypercosmic gods may be called Prc30 ​Even though the w Persephone, in Greek its first unity is still called Diana, the second Persephone, and the third Minerva, whereas the barbarians say that Hecate comes first, Soul second, and Power third. Prc31 ​According to the preceding conclusion, what Proclus thought can explain one of the sayings of Zoroaster in its Greek version, although the reading and explanation are dif­fer­ent in Chaldean. Prc32 ​The third trinity of hypercosmic gods is called Apollo, and reversion befits it. Prc33 ​A trinity that watches and preserves accompanies Persephone’s trinity at her side. Prc47 ​­Every ­middle order abides, stable in the one before, and in itself supports the one that follows. Prc48 ​Just as the first Trinity ­after Unity is every­thing as intelligible, commensurate, and bounded in form, so the second Trinity is every­thing as living, true, and unbounded in form, and the third is all of this as belonging properly to the mixture and beautiful in form. Prc49 ​The first Trinity only abides, the second abides and pro­cesses, the third turns back ­after pro­cessing. Prc52 ​By the place beyond the heavens, we should understand that for the second trinity this is more intelligible than intellected, more intellected than intelligible for the hollow below the heavens, and for the heavens sharing equally in both.

488

Appendix C

7

Conclusions 10 in Number According to the Ancient Teaching of Mercurius Trismegistus the Egyptian Mtr7 ​God warns man about ­things to come in six ways: through dreams, omens, birds, entrails, inspiration, and the Sibyl. Mtr10 ​Within every­one are ten tormentors: ignorance, grief, inconsistency, lust, injustice, extravagance, deceit, envy, fraud, anger, recklessness, malice. Corollary: ​The ten tormentors described in the previous conclusion according to Mercury, as one who thinks deeply about it w ­ ill see, correspond in Kabbalah to the evil grouping of ten with its governors, of whom I have had nothing to say in the Kabbalist conclusions ­because this is a secret.

8

Kabbalist Conclusions 47 in Number Regarding the Secret Teaching of Hebrew Kabbalist Sages, May We Always Remember Them Well 1K1 ​Just as a ­human being and lower priest sacrifices souls of nonreasoning animals to God, so Michael, a higher priest, sacrifices souls of animals that reason. 1K2 ​­There are nine hierarchies of angels, whose names are Cherubim, Seraphim, Hasmalim, Haiot, Aralim, Tarsisim, Ophanim, Thephsarim, and Isim. 1K4 ​Adam’s sin was to cut the Kingdom off from other Plants. 1K5 ​God created the world with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in which the first man sinned. 1K6 ​The ­great North Wind is the source of all souls in general, just as other Days are sources of some souls but not of all. 1K7 ​When Solomon says in his prayer in the Book of Kings hear, O heavens, we should understand the heavens to be the Green Line that rings the universe. 1K9 ​By the six Days of Genesis we are given to understand the Building’s six Extremities that come forth from Bereshit just as Cedars come from Lebanon.



Appendix C

489

1K10 ​It is more correct to say that Paradise is the ­whole Building than that it is the tenth, and in the m ­ iddle of it is placed the ­great Adam who is Tiferet. 1K11 ​They say that out of Eden comes a river that divides into four headwaters, meaning that out of the second Numeration comes the third that divides into the fourth, fifth, sixth, and tenth. 1K14 ​One who knows the southern Attribute in the group on the right ­will know why e­ very journey of Abraham always goes to the South. 1K16 ​Before Moses they all prophesied through the Doe with One Horn. 1K17 ​Wherever Scripture mentions love between male and female, we are given a mystical repre­sen­ta­tion of Tiferet’s conjunction with the Congregation of Israel or of bet’s with Tiferet. 1K19 ​The letters of a na me of the evil demon who is the Prince of This World and of a Name of God, the Triagrammaton, are the same, and one who knows how to arrange their transposition ­will derive the one from the other. 1K24 ​When Job said who makes peace on high, he understood the Southern W ­ ater, the Northern Fire, and their Commanders, of whom nothing more should be said. 1K28 ​By the flying fowl created on the fifth Day we should understand the angels within the world who appear to h ­ umans, not ­those who do not appear except in spirit. 1K30 ​No angel with six wings ever changes. 1K33 ​In the ­whole Law ­there are no letters whose forms, ligatures, separations, twisting, direction, defect, excess, smallness, greatness, crowning, closing, opening, and order do not reveal secrets of the ten Numerations. 1K36 ​Sodom sinned by severing the Last Plant. 1K37 ​By the secret of the prayer before dawn we should understand nothing other than the Attribute of Piety. 1K40 ​Whenever we do not know the Attribute whose influence covers the prayer that we pray, we should resort to the Lord of the Nose. 1K41 ​­Every good soul is a new soul coming from the East.

490

Appendix C

1K44 ​When the soul grasps what­ever it can grasp and is joined to a higher soul, it ­will rub off its earthly covering and ­will be rooted up from its place and joined with divinity.

9

Headnote Conclusions numbering 500 and following my own opinion, divided ten ways into physical, theological, Platonic, and mathematical ­theses, unusual ­theses to state or to reconcile opinions, Chaldean, Orphic, magical, and Kabbalist ­theses. In all of them I propose nothing as asserted or acceptable except insofar as the Most Holy Roman Church judges it e­ ither true or acceptable—­a lso its most worthy head, the Supreme Pontiff , Innocent VIII—­and anyone is thoughtless who does not submit the judgment of his own thinking to the Pope’s judgment.

10

Unusual Conclusions Numbering 17 and Following My Own Opinion to Reconcile Statements That Seem Absolutely Incompatible First by Aristotle and Plato, Then by Other Teachers 2UR1 ​­There is no prob­lem of natu­ral philosophy or theology about which Aristotle and Plato do not agree in meaning and substance even though they seem to disagree in words. 2UR4 ​On the subject of theology, Thomas, Scotus, and Giles are in harmony on basics and at the root, although in branches and at the surface of words one of them may seem quite out of tune with another.

11

Philosophical Conclusions Numbering 80 and Following My Own Opinion Which, while Disagreeing with the Usual Philosophy, Still Do Not Differ Much from the Usual Way of D ­ oing Philosophy. 2Ds5 ​A singular is not understood by the intellect—­neither in fact nor even in the view of Aristotle, the Commentator, and Thomas.



Appendix C

491

2Ds16 ​A tractate on suppositions does not belong to a logic. 2Ds44 ​If Thomas says that, according to Aristotle, the Intelligences are in a genus, he w ­ ill oppose himself no less than Aristotle. 2Ds53 ​If Thomas says that, according to Aristotle, ­there are accidents in the Intelligences, he w ­ ill contradict not only Aristotle but himself.

12

Unusual Conclusions Numbering 71 and Following My Own Opinion That Bring New Teachings into Philosophy 2UD1 ​Just as the to-be of properties is preceded by quidditive to-be, so is quidditive to-be preceded by unitary to-be. 2UD46 ​Given any object that can be practiced, an act that practices it is nobler than an act that theorizes about it—­other ­things being equal. 2UD49 ​Saying of God that he is an intellect or intelligent is more inappropriate than saying of a rational soul that it is an angel. 2UD60 ​The soul understands nothing actually and distinctly except itself.

13

Conclusions in Theology Numbering 29 Following My Own Opinion and Quite Dif­fer­ent from the Usual Way of Talking about Theology 2ἀ e1 ​Anyone who says that an accident cannot exist ­unless it exists in ­will be able to hold to the sacrament of the Eucharist even while holding that the substance of bread does not remain, as held in the usual way. 2ἀ e2 ​If one holds the usual view about the possibility of being supposited in regard to any creature what­ever, I say that, without bread changing into Christ’s body or without eliminating the breadness, it could happen that Christ’s body would be on the altar in keeping with the real­ity of the sacrament of the Eucharist, ­because the statement would be a dictum about the pos­si­ble, not about being so.

492

Appendix C

2ἀ e8 ​As far as the real presence is concerned, Christ did not truly descend to Hell, as stated by Thomas and on the usual view, but only in regard to the eff ect. 2ἀ e10 ​­Those words—­this is my body and the rest said in the consecration—­ are taken materially, not as signifying. 2ἀ e13 ​I do not assent to the usual statement by theologians who say that God can take on any nature what­ever, and I grant this only for a nature able to reason. 2ἀ e14 ​Neither the cross of Christ nor any image should be adored with the adoration of worship, even in the way that Thomas proposes. 2ἀ e18 ​I state this as acceptable, and I would assert it firmly except that what theologians usually say is the opposite, and yet I maintain that this statement is acceptable in itself, as follows: that just as no one holds any view just ­because he wants to have that view, so no one believes anything to be true just ­because he wants to believe it is true. Corollary: ​It is not in the power of a h ­ uman to believe an article of faith to be true when he likes and to believe it false when he likes. 2ἀ e19 ​­Were it not for sayings by saints who in their statements seem plainly to say the opposite, I would assert this firmly with the conclusion following it, yet I assert them as acceptable and as capable of being defended by reasoning, and the first is that mortal sin in itself is a l­ imited evil. 2ἀ e20 ​The second is that for a m ortal sin ­limited in time, the penalty should be not unlimited in time but only l­ imited. 2ἀ e29 ​It is more reasonable to believe that Origen is saved than to believe him damned.

14

Conclusions on Plato’s Teaching Following My Own Opinion and Numbering 62; Few Are Given H ­ ere ­because the First Unusual Conclusion Undertakes to Analyze the Whole of Plato’s Teaching 2Pla1 ​ By t riadic numbers that Plato, in the Timaeus, puts in a t riangle signifying the soul, we are advised how far to go, in numbering forms, by



Appendix C

493

the nature of what the first forming form is. But by dyadic numbers posited in the same place, we are advised, by the nature of what a ­middle term is in general, about how far to coordinate ­middle terms with the two posited extremes. 2Pla45 ​ The sentience in nature posited by Alkindi, Bacon, William of Paris, and some ­others—­but especially all the Magi—is nothing other than the sentience in the vehicle posited by Platonists. 15

Conclusions about Mathe­matics Following My Own Opinion and Numbering 85 2Mth1 ​Mathematical sciences are not real. 2Mth5 ​ Just as Aristotle would be correct to say that the ancients—­had they taken mathematicals not in a f ormal sense but materially—­went wrong in thinking about nature ­because they treated physical ­things as mathematicals, so it is absolutely correct that moderns who use mathe­ matics to discuss natu­ral prob­lems have destroyed the foundations of natu­ral philosophy. 2Mth11 ​ ­There is a way through numbers to investigate and understand every­thing knowable. To verify this conclusion I promise that I w ­ ill use a method of numbers to answer the 74 questions that follow.

Questions That He Promises to Answer with Numbers

2Mth12 ​­Whether ­there is a God. 2Mth13 ​­Whether he is infinite. 2Mth14 ​­Whether he is the cause of all ­things. 2Mth21 ​How do ele­ments exist in the heavens? 2Mth33 ​What does body mean?

494

Appendix C

16

Conclusions Numbering 15 Following My Own Opinion on Understanding Sayings of Zoroaster and of His Chaldean Expositors 2Z1 ​ What Chaldean translators say about Zoroaster’s first saying, on a ladder from Hell to the First Fire, signifies nothing other than a series of natures extending through the cosmos from m ­ atter, without a rung, to one who is above e­ very rung. 2Z2 ​ I s ay that by mysterial powers in the same place the translators understand nothing other than natu­ral magic. 2Z3 ​What the translators say about Zoroaster’s second saying, on a double air, ­water, and earth, means just that any ele­ment that can be divided into pure and impure has reasoning and unreasoning tenants, whereas an ele­ment that is only pure has reasoning tenants only. 2Z6 ​Statements by Chaldean translators about aphorism 11 on the double drunkenness of Bacchus and Silenus are completely intelligible through statements by Kabbalists about the double wine. 2Z7 ​What the translators say about aphorism 14 is completely intelligible through what Kabbalists say about the death of the kiss. 2Z8 ​By the three-­layered wrapping in aphorism 17, the Magi understand nothing but the soul’s threefold dwelling—­heavenly, spiritual, and earthly. 2Z9 ​From the preceding conclusion you can understand something about the garments of skin that Adam made for himself—­a lso about the skins that ­were in the Tabernacle. 2Z13 ​By boy in the translators, understand nothing other than intellect. 17

Conclusions about Magic Numbering 26 Following My Own Opinion ­ eople ­today, which the Church rightly bans, has 2M1 ​All magic used by p no solidity, no foundation, and no truth ­because it depends on the power of enemies of primal truth, ­these dark powers that pour the darkness of deceit into minds disposed to evil.



Appendix C

495

2M2 ​Natu­ral magic is licit and not forbidden, and I propose the following ­theses according to my own opinion about general princi­ples of a theory for this science. 2M3 ​Magic is the practical part of natu­ral knowledge. 2M4 ​ From this conclusion and number 46 of the unusual t­ heses on new doctrine, it follows that magic is the noblest part of natu­ral knowledge. 2M5 ​In heaven or on earth ­there is no power, seedwise and separated, that a magus cannot unify and activate. ­ hether it is magic or Kabbalah 2M6 ​Any astonishing eff ect that occurs, w or some other kind, must be referred chiefly and mainly to the glorious and blessed God, whose grace rains down supercelestial w ­ aters of wondrous power ­every day on contemplative p ­ eople of good ­will. 2M7 ​ Christ’s deeds cannot have been done e­ ither by a method of Kabbalah or by a method of magic. 2M8 ​ Christ’s miracles are the most certain evidence of his divinity not ­ ecause of what was done but ­because of how it was done. b 2M9 ​­There is no knowledge that gives us more certainty of Christ’s divinity than magic and Kabbalah. 2M10 ​ What the magus who is ­human does artificially, nature has done naturally by making the ­human. 2M13 ​­Doing magic is nothing but marrying the world. 2M15 ​ No magical action can have any eff ect ­unless it has an act of Kabbalah, explicit or implicit, linked with it. 2M18 ​The nature that is a horizon of temporal eternity is near the magus but above him, and Kabbalah belongs to him. 2M23 ​Except the threefold and tenfold, any number is material in magic, but ­those are formal, and in magical arithmetic they are numbers of numbers. 2M25 ​Just as characters belong to an act of magic, so numbers belong to an act of Kabbalah, and lying between the two is a use of letters that avoids e­ ither extreme. 2M26 ​ Just as something untouched by mediating c­ auses happens by the influence of the First Agent when this is specific and unmediated, so by an

496

Appendix C

act of Kabbalah, if the Kabbalah is pure and unmediated, something happens that no magic touches.

18

Conclusions Numbering 31 Following My Own Opinion on a Way to Understand the Hymns of Orpheus as about Magic, Namely, a Secret Wisdom of Divine and Natu­ral ­T hings That I Was the First to Discover in Them 2Or4 ​Just as David’s hymns are wonderfully useful for an act of Kabbalah, so are the hymns of Orpheus useful for an act of true, licit, and natu­ral magic. 2Or5 ​Numbered ­under the figure of the Pythagorean tetractys, the number of the Orphic Hymns is the same as the number by which the threefold God created the world. 2Or12 ​By the eightfold number of maritime hymns, a property of bodily nature is pointed out to us. ­ ather’s Mind—­hymns of 2Or20 ​From the septet of hymns attributed to the F Protogonus, Pallas, Saturn, Venus, Rhea, Law, and Bacchus—­one who understands and thinks deeply can conclude something about the end of time. 2Or21 ​ The eff ect of the preceding hymns is nothing without an act of Kabbalah, whose special result is to put ­every figural, continuous, and discrete quantity into practice. 2Or24 ​He ­will not get drunk on any Bacchus who has not first been joined to his own Muse.

19

Kabbalist Conclusions Numbering 72 Following My Own Opinion and Providing Power­f ul Confirmation of the Christian Religion from the Very Princi­ples of Hebrew Sages 2K1 ​What­ever the rest of the Kabbalists may say, the first distinction that I would make divides knowledge of Kabbalah into knowledge of Sefirot and Shemot, similar to practical and visionary knowledge.



Appendix C

497

2K2 ​What­ever other Kabbalists may say, I would divide the visionary part of Kabbalah into four, corresponding to the fourfold division of philosophy that I h ave usually proposed. First is what I c all knowing how to revolve the alphabet, corresponding to the part of philosophy that I call comprehensive philosophy. The second, third, and fourth part is the threefold Chariot, corresponding to a threefold particularizing philosophy about divine, m ­ iddle, and sensible natures. 2K3 ​ Knowledge that is the practical part of Kabbalah puts into practice all of formal metaphysics and lower theology. 2K4 ​Ensoph is not to be numbered along with other Numerations ­because it is the unity of t­ hose Numerations, removed and uncommunicated, not a coordinated unity. 2K5 ​ Any Hebrew Kabbalist, following princi­ples and statements of the knowledge of Kabbalah, is forced inevitably to grant precisely—­without addition, subtraction, or variation—­what the Catholic faith of Christians declares about the Trinity and each divine person, F ­ ather, Son, and Holy Spirit. Corollary: ​Not only ­those who deny the Trinity but ­those who treat it in any way diff erently than the Catholic Church treats it—as do Arians, Sabellians, and the like—­can plainly be refuted if princi­ples of Kabbalah are accepted. 2K6 ​ Someone with a deep knowledge of Kabbalah can understand that the three g­ reat fourfold names of God contained in the secrets of Kabbalists o ­ ught to be assigned to the three persons of the Trinity by a wondrous allocation so that the name ‫ אהיה‬belongs to the ­Father, the name ‫ יהוה‬to the Son, the name ‫ אדני‬to the Holy Spirit. 2K7 ​No Hebrew Kabbalist can deny that the name Jesus, if we interpret it according to the method and princi­ples of Kabbalah, signifies precisely all of this and nothing e­ lse, as follows: God, the Son of God, and the Wisdom of the ­Father united through the third person of the Deity (who is the hottest fire of Love) to h ­ uman nature in the unity of the supposit. 2K8 ​ From the preceding conclusion one can understand why Paul said that Jesus was given the name that is above e­ very name and why it is said that ­every being in heaven, on earth, and in the infernal regions bends the knee at the name of Jesus; this also has ­great Kabbalst importance, as any one who knows Kabbalah deeply can understand on his own.

498

Appendix C

2K10 ​ What Kabbalists call ‫ מטטרון‬is beyond doubt what Orpheus names Pallas, Zoroaster the F ­ ather’s Mind, Mercury God’s Son, Pythagoras Wisdom, Parmenides the Intelligible sphere. 2K11 ​ The way (though Kabbalists leave it unspoken) in which rational souls are sacrificed to God by an archangel happens only by the soul’s parting from the body, not the body’s parting from the soul—­except secondarily, as it happens in the death of the kiss, of which it is written: the death of his saints is precious in the sight of the Lord. 2K13 ​One who works at Kabbalah and mixes in nothing extraneous, if he stays long at the work, w ­ ill die from binsica, and if he makes a ­mistake in the work or comes to it unpurified, he w ­ ill be devoured by Azazel through the Attribute of Judgment. 2K17 ​ One who knows what the Purest Wine is for Kabbalists ­will know why David said I ­will be made drunk on the bounty of your ­house, and what the drunkenness was that the ancient prophet Musaeus called happiness, and what each of t­ hese Bacchi signifies according to Orpheus. 2K20 ​If Kabbalists attend to their interpretation of this term ‫אז‬, which means then, they ­will be greatly enlightened about the mystery of the Trinity. 2K21 ​ One who has joined a statement of the Kabbalists, saying that the Numeration called Just and the Redeemer is also called zeh, with a statement by Talmudists, saying that Isaac went like zeh carry­ing his cross, ­will see that what was prefigured in Isaac was fulfilled in Christ. 2K22 ​Through sayings by Kabbalists on Esau’s redness and a saying in the book Bereshit rabbah that Esau was red and red avenges him—of whom it is asked, why is your garment red? —it means expressly that Christ, to whom our teachers take this text to refer, ­will be the one to wreak vengeance on unclean powers. 2K24 ​ ­Those Hebrews who say that it was not fitting for Christ’s death to atone for mankind’s sin are refuted beyond any doubt by the reply of Kabbalists to the question, why was the passage in the book of Numbers on the red heifer joined to the passage on the death of Miriam; by their explanation of the text on the sin of the calf where Moses said take me out; and through statements in the book of Zohar on the verse, and by his bruise are we healed.



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2K28 ​Through the term et-­that appears twice in the text In the beginning God created heaven and earth, I believe that Moses means the creation of an intellectual nature and an animate nature which in the natu­ral order came before the creation of heaven and earth. 2K29 ​The saying of Kabbalists that a Green Line rings the universe applies most fittingly to the last conclusion that we drew from the ideas of Porphyry. 2K30 ​ Following their own princi­ples, Kabbalists must necessarily grant that the true Messiah w ­ ill have been such that one may truly say of him that he is God and God’s Son. 2K33 ​Through this term ‫איש‬, written with aleph, iod, and scin and meaning man, which is applied to God in the phrase Man of War, we are given an absolutely complete reminder of the mystery of the Trinity through a method of Kabbalah. 2K34 ​By the name ‫הוא‬, the mystery of the Trinity along with the possibility of the Incarnation is revealed to us through a method of Kabbalah; this name, ­because it is written with the three letters he, vav, and aleph, is a name most properly applied to God, and this is most consistent not only with Kabbalists, who often say it explic­itly, but also with the theology of Dionysius the Areopagite. 2K36 ​From the preceding conclusion one can understand why Kabbalists say that God clothed himself in ten garments when he created the world. 2K37 ​One who understands the subordination of Piety to Wisdom in the group on the right ­will understand perfectly through a method of Kabbalah how Abraham in his Day saw the Day of Christ through a straight line and rejoiced. 2K39 ​ From this conclusion and from the thirtieth above, it follows that any Kabbalist must grant that Jesus, when asked who he was, gave exactly the right answer, saying, I who speak to you am the Beginning. 2K41 ​In Kabbalah one can know through the mystery of the closed mem why Christ sent a Paraclete ­after him. 2K42 ​ From princi­ples of Kabbalah one knows how correct Jesus was to say before Abraham was born I am.

500

Appendix C

2K47 ​Whoever knows the Attribute of the North Wind in Kabbalah ­will know why Satan promised Christ the kingdoms of the world if he would fall down and adore him. 2K48 ​ What­ever the rest of the Kabbalists may say, I s ay that the ten spheres correspond to the ten Numerations as follows, starting from the Building: Jupiter belongs to the fourth, Mars to the fifth, the Sun sixth, Saturn seventh, Venus eighth, Mercury ninth, the Moon tenth; then, above the building, the firmament belongs to the third, the first moved sphere to the second, the empyrean heaven to the first. 2K53 ​­Because for light to come to be is nothing but for light to participate, most fitting is that explanation of the Kabbalists that in the Let ­there be light we understand light to be a Mirror That Shines and in the ­ἀ ere was light a Mirror That Does Not Shine. 2K56 ​If he is expert in Kabbalah, one who knows how to extend the quaternary into the denary w ­ ill have a method for deriving the Name of 72 letters from the ineff able Name. 2K57 ​From the preceding conclusion one who understands formal arithmetic can understand that working through the Scemamphoras is proper to a rational nature. 2K58 ​ It would be more correct to explain the Becadmin that the Chaldaean gloss applies to the term Bresit from the ideas of Wisdom rather than from the Thirty-­Two Paths, as other Kabbalists say, although both are correct in Kabbalah. 2K59 ​ Anyone who thinks deeply about the fourfold arrangement of ­things—­first, the unity and stability of remaining, second pro­cession, third reversion, fourth blissful reunion—­will see that the letter bet works first with the first letter, medially with a ­middle letter, and last with the last letters. 2K62 ​ One who has thought deeply about the novenary number of beatitudes that Matthew writes about in the Gospel w ­ ill see that they fit wonderfully with the novenary of nine Numerations that come beneath the first, which is the unapproachable abyss of the Deity. ­ nder the guise of philosophical 2K63 ​Just as Aristotle himself concealed u speculation and obscured by terse expression the more divine philosophy



Appendix C

501

that ancient phi­los­o­phers veiled ­under fables and stories, so Rabbi Moses of Egypt in the book that Latins call the Guide for the Perplexed embraces mysteries of Kabbalah through hidden interpretations of deep meaning while seeming through the outer bark of words to proceed philosophically. 2K65 ​It is more correct that amen should say Tiferet and Kingdom, as the method of number shows, than that it should say Kingdom only, as some suppose. 2K67 ​ Through a saying of Kabbalists that the heavens are made of Fire and ­Water, in one stroke we are shown both a theological truth about the Sefirot themselves and the philosophical truth that ele­ments are in the heavens only by their active power. 2K68 ​One who knows what the denary is in formal arithmetic and recognizes the nature of the first ­spherical number ­will know what I still have not read in any Kabbalist, which is that in Kabbalah this is the foundation of the secret of the ­Great Jubilee. 2K69 ​On the basis of the preceding conclusion, one can know at the same time the secret of the Fifty Gates of Understanding, of the generation of a thousand, and of the Kingdom of All Worlds. 2K72 ​ Just as a t rue astrology teaches us to read in the book of God, so Kabbalah teaches us to read in the book of the Law. 20

Colophon and Final Notice Printed at Rome by the work of the Honorable Eucharius Silber, alias Franck, on the seventh day of December in the year 1486 since the Lord’s incarnation during the reign of the Supreme Pontiff , Innocent VIII, in the third year of his papacy. ­ ese conclusions ­will be disputed only ­after Epiphany. Meanwhile they Th ­will be published in all the universities of Italy. And if any phi­los­o­pher or theologian, even from distant parts of Italy, wishes to come to Rome and debate, the same Lord who intends to dispute also promises to cover the costs of travel from his own resources.

appendix d

•

Glossary

Items included are words and names, but not the most famous names (Aquinas, Dante, Plato, and so on) nor ­those of persons whose part in the book is small, and only the most impor­tant words and phrases are glossed. Terms (or forms of them) within items are italicized if they refer to other items. References to the Oration (Orat., translated in Appendix A), Conclusions (Appendix C) and chapters and sections of this book are also given, where relevant. Abbagnano, Nicola (1901–1990) ​Existentialist phi­los­o­pher; Chapter 4.3. Abraham  ​Orat. 34 describes journeys of the biblical patriarch, the loving S4 in sefirotic Kabbalah, where Isaac is the stern S5; Chapters 11.1, 12.4. Abubacer (ca. 1109–1185) ​Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl al-­Qaysi, whose Story of Hay, Son of Yaqzan, describes a curriculum culminating in mystical ­union; Chapter 12.2. Abulafia, Abraham ​Pico’s main guide to Kabbalah, came from Spain to Sicily in the late thirteenth c­ entury; Chapter 11.1–2; see Ve-­zot li-­Yehuda. Account of the Beginning ​Reading Genesis esoterically to find princi­ples of natu­ral philosophy; Chapter 13.2. Account of the Chariot ​Reading visions of the prophet Ezekiel esoterically to find princi­ples of metaphysics; Chapter 13.2; see ἀ rone. actualism ​Or ­actual idealism, the metaphysics derived by Gentile from Hegel and Kant; Chapter 4.1–3. Adam ​God addresses him at Orat. 6, and Pico puts him among the Sefirot at S6, identifying him with Jesus; Chapter 12.2–3. Aesculapius ​Orat. 32; see Asclepius and Asklepios. 502



Appendix D

503

Agent Intellect ​The level of divinity where conjunction occurs, hence the key to Pico’s eschatology and metaphysical psy­chol­ogy; Chapters 11.2, 4; 12.2; see Averroism, Metatron, Pallas. Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius (1486–1535) ​His book On the Occult ­ ntil 1533, was still authoritaPhilosophy, drafted by 1510 but not published u tive in the next ­century. Alberti, Leon Battista (1404–1472) ​Renowned in architecture, education, economics, engineering, lit­er­a­ture, mathe­matics, painting, and other fields; Burckhardt’s ideal ‘Re­nais­sance man.’ Alciato, Andrea (1492–1550) ​Erudite jurist, published the first of many editions of his collection of allegorical images or ‘emblems’ in 1531. Alcibiades ​Friend of Socrates, notoriously unreliable politician, and titular character in two dialogues attributed to Plato; the one cited at Orat. 30 and 58 says that magic was taught to kings in Persia; Chapter 12.3. Alexander of Aphrodisias ​Commented on Aristotle around 200 CE and, unusually for this period, was not a Platonist. Alfarabi (ca. 870–951) ​Abu Nasr al-­Farabi promoted Aristotelian falasafa so aggressively that Algazali (al-­Ghazali) and other Muslims felt obliged to defend religion against philosophy, eventually provoking the systematic naturalism of Averroes. Alkindi (ca. 800–870) ​Abu Yusuf Ya’qub ibn Ishaq Al-­K indi studied Aristotle and the Neoplatonists when philosophy was just emerging in the Muslim world; his treatise On Rays discussed astrology in a naturalist way. alphabet ​See letters. Ammonius (late 1st C., CE) ​Taught Plutarch at Athens; Chapter 12.3. Ammonius (ca. 435–526 CE) ​Studied with Proclus in Athens and commented on Aristotle in Alexandria; mentioned at Orat. 47. Ammonius Saccas (early 3rd C., CE) ​Taught Plotinus, and maybe Origen, in Alexandria. Anagnine, Eugenio ​Evgeny Arkadevitch Ananin, a Rus­sian emigré to Italy, published an impor­tant book about Pico in 1937; Chapter 3.8. ancient theologians ​Pico learned from Ficino that primordial pagan sages, including Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, and Pythagoras, established a secular wisdom that culminated in Plato’s Acad­emy and reinforced Christian doctrine: Orat. 52, ­ athers, Orphic Hymns. 55, 69; Chapters 12.6, 13.3; see Chaldean Oracles, F Apollo ​God of healing and prophecy, identified by Pico with Jesus and the Sefirah named Tiferet (S6, Beauty), the subject of Orat. 30, which interprets maxims seen on his ­temple at Delphi: Chapter 12.3.

504

Appendix D

Apology ​­After interrogation by Vatican officials in March 1487 about the condemned ­theses in the Conclusions, Pico hastily published this lengthy defense that turned the opposition to him into hostility; see Benivieni, Conclusions, Heptaplus. appetitive and irascible ​Plato taught that the soul has, in addition to a higher faculty of reason, subrational drives, the ‘appetitive’ and ‘brave-­hearted,’ using Greek words not so pejorative as the ‘desirous’ and ‘wrathful’ of medieval Latin phi­los­o­phers; Orat. 18; Chapter 12.1. Apuleius (fl. 160 CE) ​Platonist orator, author of the Metamorphoses, also wrote about demons and magic. Aramaic ​A relative of Hebrew, usually written with the same letters, and the language of the Zohar; see Chaldean. Areopagite ​See Dionysius the Areopagite, pseudo-. Arndt, Johann (1555–1621) ​His True Chris­tian­ity (1610), a popu­lar devotional work, inspired l­ ater challenges to orthodox Lutheranism; Chapter 6.3; see Böhme, Pietism, Spener. Arnold, Gottfried (1666–1714) ​His Non-­partisan History (1700) of Christian mysticism encouraged critics of the Lutheran establishment; Chapter 6.3. ascent ​Rising and climbing are common meta­phors for the mystic’s journey up to God; Orat. 19, 24; Chapter 11.2; see curriculum, kiss, ladder, mystical ­union, regimen. asceticism ​To strengthen and ­free the soul by punishing the body was a characteristic practice of Chris­tian­ity in Pico’s time and ­earlier; Orat. 18; Chapters 11.4, 12.3, 13.3. Asclepius ​An ancient Hermetic discourse, known in a Latin version since late antiquity, named for a disciple of Hermes Trismegistus, cited (perhaps indirectly) by Pico at the beginning of the Oration and used elsewhere without citation; Chapters 10.3, 11.4; Orat. 1, 8. Asklepios ​Greek god of healing, also ‘Asclepius’ in En­glish and sometimes in Latin Aesculapius; in Greco-­Roman Egypt a disciple of Hermes Trismegistus, whose name was used as the title of a Hermetic discourse; Orat. 1, 8; Chapters 11.4, 12.1. autoctisis ​‘Self-­creation,’ a technical term in Gentile’s actualism; Chapter 4.2. Avempace (ca. 1085–1139)  ​O rat. 47 mentions Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Bajja, who wrote a treatise on conjunction; Chapter 12.1; see Abubacer, Averroes. Averroes (1126–1198) ​Abu’l-­Walid Muhammad ben Ahmad ben Rushd, the most authoritative medieval commentator on Aristotle, studied by Pico since the early 1480s; Chapter 11.2; see Alfarabi.



Appendix D

505

Averroism ​As understood by Christian phi­los­o­phers, the naturalist psy­chol­ogy of Averroes became a threat to Christian doctrine, especially the immortality of the individual h ­ uman soul; Chapter 11.2. Avicenna (970–1037) ​Abu-­ʿAli al-­Husayn ibn-’Abdallah Ibn-­Sina, a phi­los­o­pher and physician who systematized ­earlier Muslim thinking about philosophy and science. Azazel ​The scapegoat demon of Leviticus 16 was named by Pico in thesis T2K13. Bacchus ​A name of Apollo and hence also of Jesus in the Oration; Orat. 28, 31; Chapter 12.3; see Adam, Tiferet. Bahir, Sefer ha-­ ​From Spain or Provence in the late twelfth ­century, the Book of Brightness was, with the ­later Zohar, one of two fundamental texts of Kabbalah and the first to describe the Sefirot; Flavius made a Latin translation for Pico; Chapter 11.1. Barbaro, Ermolao (1453–1493) ​Expert on Aristotle, the Greek commentators, and Pliny the Elder, taught philosophy in Padua, ran a school in Venice, appointed to high church office shortly before he died. Bartoli, Ricardo (d. 1806) ​A Franciscan friar with revolutionary instincts who made a stirring speech about Pico in 1789 to schoolboys in Mirandola; Chapter 7.1; see Este, Tiraboschi. Battista Mantovano Spagnoli (1447–1516) ​The Mantuan, a prolific and beloved poet, became head of the Carmelite Order. ­Battle of the Books ​Jonathan Swift’s satire of 1704 about a controversy, already tiresome and fought mainly by French writers, on ­whether ancient authors or moderns ­were better. Bayle, Pierre (1647–1706) ​Huguenot intellectual, used a book-­review journal and an encyclopedic dictionary to discuss controversial topics while disguising his own views. Beerbohm, Max (1872–1956) ​English author of fiction and nonfiction, mostly short, also well known for his caricatures; Chapter 9.1. Benivieni, Girolamo (1453–1542) ​Close friend of Ficino and Pico, whose Commento of 1486 interpreted a Canzona by the poet; follower of Savonarola in the 1490s; Chapter 11.3. Bergson, Henri (1859–1941) ​His Creative Evolution (1907), which made antimechanist vitalism an international craze, was only one of his contributions to philosophy. Berti, Domenico (1820–1897) ​His 1859 article on Pico introduced the prince to modern Italian scholarship; Chapter 3.2. Bildad the Shuhite ​One of three friends who comfort Job in the biblical book; Chapter 12.2; see Elihu, ­Fathers.

506

Appendix D

Blondel, Maurice (1861–1949) ​His Sorbonne thesis on Action (1893) examined the role of ­human agency in the theology of salvation; Chapter 4.3. blood libel ​False accusations, first recorded in the twelfth ­century, that Jews killed Christian c­ hildren to use their blood for ritual purposes; Chapter 3.3; see Simonino. Blount, Thomas Pope (1649–1697) ​MP from Hertfordshire, published a Natu­ral History in 1693 and De re poetica in 1694 a­ fter his Famous Authors (in Latin) of 1690; Chapter 6.2. Bobbio, Norberto (1909–2004) ​A po­liti­cally engaged phi­los­o­pher and po­liti­cal theorist in con­temporary Italy; Chapters 3.8, 4.3. body ​In some ascetic traditions, like Pico’s Christian Platonism, the body is the soul’s prison and tomb, from which the soul must escape; Orat. 9, 18, 26–27, 33; Chapters 11.4, 12.3, 13.2. Böhme, Jacob (1575–1624) ​A self-­educated mystic in the German tradition whose accounts of his visions, published ­a fter his death, attracted many readers; Chapter 6.3; see theosophy. Boiardo, Giulia ​­Daughter of Feltrino Boiardo, an Este ally, and Guiduccia di Correggio; s­ ister of Matteo Maria Boiardo, the poet; wife of Gianfrancesco I della Mirandola: Giovanni Pico was the last of her five ­children; Chapters 1.1, 9.3. bonifica ​Reclamation, a state policy in Fascist Italy; Chapter 3.8. Bottai, Giuseppe (1895–1959) ​Journalist, academic, and politician, joined the Fascists early, served Mussolini twice as government minister while also promoting his own politics; Chapter 3.1. Bracciolini, Poggio (1380–1459) ​Tuscan classicist, manuscript hunter, master of Latin prose, employed mainly by the papacy, became chancellor of Florence for a few years. brain, heart, liver ​A triad of Sefirot; Chapter 12.4. Bratti, Ingramo (fl. 1390) ​Chronicler of the Pico and Pio families; Chapter 1.1; see Manfredo, Papazzoni. Browning, Robert (1812–1889) ​­After Tennyson, the most acclaimed En­glish poet of his day; ­a fter 1838 spent most of the next two de­cades in Italy; Chapter 9.2. Brucker, Jacob (1696–1770) ​Lutheran minister, taught school while learning the eclectic method and planning his Critical History of Philosophy in five volumes (1742–1744), the first comprehensive treatment of the subject; Chapter 6.1. Brunelleschi, Filippo (1377–1446) ​Tuscan architect and sculptor, designed the dome for Florence’s main church and completed most of it; see Ghiberti. Bruni, Leonardo (1370–1444) ​Tuscan classicist, historian, and politician who became chancellor of Florence in 1427 ­a fter working in Rome for the papacy.



Appendix D

507

Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600) ​Dominican friar, wrote unorthodox philosophy in Italian as well as Latin, burned as a heretic. Budde, Johann (1667–1729) ​Studied at Wittenberg, taught philosophy, theology, and classics at Jena and Halle, wrote abundantly to promote his eclectic ideology; Chapter 6.1. Buhle, Johann (1763–1821) ​Philosopher, classicist, and historian, educated at Helmstedt and Göttingen, taught in Moscow for ten years and returned to Germany, finished his History of Modern Philosophy in 1805; Chapter 8.1. Calixt, George (1586–1656) ​Theologian from Helmstedt, during the Thirty Years War, urged Protestants to reach a consensus on dogma, but without success, giving syncretism a bad name; Chapter 6.1; see eclecticism. Calypso ​Her name is a verb in Orat. 9, where she merges with another Homeric character, the witch Circe; Chapter 11.4. Campanella, Tommaso (1568–1639) ​Dominican phi­los­o­pher, spent most of his life in jail, but was better known than Descartes when he died. Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945) ​Prolific and prominent neo-­Kantian, promoted a systematic philosophy of culture; Chapter 10.1. Ceretti, Felice (1835–1915) ​A priest in Mirandola and a local historian, completed twelve volumes of Historical Rec­ords and studied the Pico f­ amily; Chapter 3.4. Chaldean ​The language of “Chaldean theology” at Orat. 10, 33, and 69 is Hebrew mixed with Aramaic and written in Ethiopic script, but the ‘Chaldeans’ in Orat. 41 are astrologers; Chapters 12.4, 6; 13.1–3; see Persians, Zoroaster. Chaldean Oracles  ​Orat. 69 identifies ­t hese verse fragments, prob­ably from the third c­ entury CE, with teachings of Zoroaster, cited in App. C.16; Chapter 13.3; see ancient theologians, Chaldean, Magi, Orphic Hymns, Proclus. chameleon ​A problematic symbol of ­human mutability at Orat. 8; Chapter 11.4; see Metatron and Proteus. Chariot ​See Account. Cherubic life  ​Orat. 15–16 sees angelic existence as the best route for h ­ umans to mystical ­union; Chapter 11.5. Cherubim ​With the loving blaze of Seraphim above them and ἀ rones judging below, t­ hese bodiless spirits of contemplation show ­humans how to shed the body and surpass humanity; Orat. 11–16; Chapter 11.5; see Cherubic life. Chronicles, Book of ​A lavishly illustrated universal history, the Liber cronicarum published in Nuremberg by Hartman Schedel and ­others on July 12, 1493; Chapter 1.2.

508

Appendix D

Cibò, Cardinal Giovanni ​Enthroned as Pope Innocent VIII on September 12, 1484, he died on July 25, 1492. Circe ​See Calypso. Climacus, John ​A Syrian monk of the sixth ­century, his Ladder of Paradise describes ­ nion. steps of religious perfection; see ascent, curriculum, ladder, mystical u Commento ​See Benivieni. completion ​The only complete perfection is God’s simplicity, but ritual tech­ ere mystical means of becoming niques (telestika) and devotional disciplines w divine (theôsis) and thus complete (teleiôsis); Chapter 12.1; see conjunction. Conclusions ​Printed in a hurry by December 7, 1486, the 900 Conclusions was one of three books published by Pico in his lifetime; Apps. B and C; see Apology, Benivieni, Heptaplus, thesis. concord ​Orat. 53 declares a goal of harmony for philosophies previously opposed to one another; Chapter 12.6; see eclecticism, friendship, peace, syncretism. concreteness ​A technical term and a norm in Gentile’s metaphysics, where it looks like a bad fit for idealism but was frequently invoked by Garin; Chapter 4.2. conjunction ​Salvation for some Muslim mystics was conjoining with the Agent Intellect and eliminating all traces of the individual person; Orat. 7, 29; T1Avr3, Plo7; Chapter 11.2, 12.2; see ascent, Abubacer, Averroes, completion, mystical ­union. Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) ​Died just ­a fter Pico was born, but Ficino ­imagined his spirit living on in the young man, who grew close to Cosimo’s grand­son, Lorenzo; Chapter 11.5. Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–1574) ​The first of the Medici to rule Florence with a title, Duke in 1537 and then ­Grand Duke in 1569. Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952) ​Philosopher, historian, cultural critic, and liberal politician, first Gentile’s partner then an adversary, at the heart of Italian intellectual life u ­ ntil ­a fter World War II. curriculum ​The first four levels of ascent in the Oration—­ethics, dialectic, natu­ral philosophy, and theology—­are theoretical and distinct from three higher experiential levels; Orat. 16, 22–28, 34; Chapter 11.4; see ascent, ladder, regimen. Cusanus ​See Nicholas of Cusa. Dagger of Faith ​The Pugio fidei, an attack on Judaism written in the thirteenth ­century by Ramón Martí, first printed in 1651. De Sanctis, Francesco (1817–1883) ​Hegelian Romantic, his History of Italian Lit­er­a­ture (1870) established the subject in its modern form.



Appendix D

509

death ​“Life in its fullness” at Orat. 25, a­ fter the soul has ascended and left the body; Chapter 12.2; see conjunction, kiss, practicing death. Del Medigo, Elia (ca. 1450–1492) ​Learned Jew from Crete, came to Italy around 1480 and tutored Pico in Averroist philosophy; Chapter 11.2. demonic magic ​At Orat. 56–57 relying on demons is always wrong, but natu­ral magic avoids them; Chapter 13.1; see goêteia. dignitas ​Latin for ‘rank,’ ‘status,’ and related words, dif­fer­ent from the modern En­glish ‘dignity’; Chapter 1. Dionysius the Areopagite, pseudo-­ ​Christian con­temporary of Proclus, wrote around 500 CE in a Neoplatonist way about mystical theology and angelology; Orat. 16, 65; Chapter 11.4–5; see ­Fathers. directions, cardinal ​South (S4), North (S5), East (S6), and West (S10) are names of Sefirot, as in T1K24; Orat. 33–34; Chapter 12.4; see Gabriel and Michael. disputation ​Formal debate, a teaching method in universities that Pico visited when learning how to state and or­ga­nize his 900 ­theses; Chapter 12.5. dividing Unity ​Like any complication of divine simplicity, a plurality of Sefirot is problematic, yet creative and not sinful, unlike Adam and Eve’s sin of breaking up Eden’s Unity by choosing a forbidden tree in the Garden; T1K4–5; Chapter 11.2; see Eden’s rivers, paradise, plants. Dreydorff, Georg ​Theologian and phi­los­o­pher, opposed Christoph Sigwart in a debate about Pico and Zwingli in 1858; Chapter 8.2. drunkenness ​Sacred inebriation is mystical ascent at Orat. 26–28 and T2K17; Chapter 12.3. Dwelling ​The Shekinah (S10). eclecticism ​A method and ideology of systematic selectivity, opposed to syncretism, ­shaped the history of philosophy as a discipline during the Enlightenment; Chapter 6.1; see Brucker, Budde, concord, Heumann, syncretism, ἀ omasius. ecstasy ​In Abulafia’s Kabbalah, rapturous states give nonrational access to the divine, and “frenzies take us outside the mind” at Orat. 15; Chapter 12.3; see body, erôs, frenzy, withdrawal. Eden’s rivers ​The Garden and its rivers at Orat. 33–34 are sefirotic, including S2–6 and S10; T1K11; Chapter 12.4; see dividing Unity, paradise. Elihu the Buzite ​Unlike Bildad’s comforting advice, the counsel that Elihu gives to Job is angry; Chapter 12.2. Eliot, George (1819–1880) ​Mary Ann Evans studied philosophy, theology, and history and often lived in Italy while, as George Eliot, she wrote novels—­ including Romola in 1862—­w idely admired in Victorian ­England; Chapter 9.2.

510

Appendix D

Empedocles (ca. 495–435 BCE) ​Named in the Oration for teachings on metempsychosis (Orat. 8), cosmic strife and friendship (20) and philosophical magic (57); Chapters 11.4, 12.2. Enfield, William (1741–1797) ​Liverpool preacher and rhetorician, translated and abridged Brucker’s Latin history of philosophy in 1791. Enoch ​Ancestor of Noah, vanishes quickly from the biblical Genesis, but interpreters identified him with Metatron, as in Orat. 8; Chapter 11.4. enthusiasm ​See Schwärmerei. epopteia ​“Gazing upon divinity” in Orat. 27, inspired by the mystical visioning that sees the Unseen in the Areopagite’s theology; Chapter 12.3. Erasmus, Desiderius (1467–1536) ​Cosmopolitan Dutch intellectual, greatest Latinist of his age, finished the Praise of Folly ­a fter 1509 while visiting ἀ omas ­ ngland; Chapter 5.1. More in E erôs ​The ecstasy in Orat. 29 is erotic, being “driven wild by desire with a love beyond telling and transported beyond ourselves”; Chapter 12.3; see frenzy. eschatology ​Theology of death, judgment, and the afterlife; in some mystical theologies the individual is annihilated when ascent is complete; see Agent Intellect, asceticism, body, conjunction. esoteric ​The explicit rule of secrecy at Orat. 64 is “to keep secret from the populace what should be told to the perfect”; Chapter 13.2; see mystery. Este ​Ducal ­family, dominated Pico’s part of Italy from the twelfth ­century through the eigh­teenth; Chapter 7.1; see Bartoli, Tiraboschi. Ethiopic script ​Two passages (Orat. 10, 33) of the only authoritative manuscript of the Oration are written in Gh’ez, a script for Ethiopian languages; Chapters 12.4, 13.2; see Aramaic, Chaldean, Persians. exotic ​Strange lore from faraway places, as in Orat. 57–58, has been a feature of magic since antiquity. Extremities of the Building ​The lower Sefirot in T1K9, 2TK48; Chapter 12.2. Ezra ​Or Esdras, a scribe or priest, brought the Law back to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon, according to canonical and apocryphal traditions; Pico summarized the stories to explain the origins of Kabbalah in Orat. 66–67; Chapter 13.2. ­Fathers, ancient ​Pagan, Jewish, and Christian sages introduced at Orat. 15 to describe Pico’s curriculum and regimen; Dionysius the Areopagite, Jacob, Job, Moses, Paul, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, and other ancient theologians are mentioned at Orat. 27, 52, 55, and 69; Chapter 11.3, 5. Fifty Gates of Understanding ​Seven paths through each of the seven lower Sefirot lead up to the fiftieth level, which is Understanding (S3); 2K69; Chapter 12.3.



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figural number ​Like an equilateral triangle of 10 discrete points, in rows of 4, 3, 2, and 1, displaying a 10 made of unities and other integers; Chapter 12.1; see numerology, tetractys. Flavius Mithridates ​Memorable alias of a converted Jew, Pico’s instructor in Judaica and translator of Kabbalist books while he was writing the Oration; Chapter 11.1–3. Foresti of Bergamo, Giacomo (1434–1520) ​Author of a chronicle, first published in 1483, that informed the Nuremberg Chronicles; Chapter 1.2. Franck, Adolphe (1809–1893) ​Politically engaged Jewish phi­los­o­pher at the Collège de France, wrote influentially about Kabbalah. Francke, August (1663–1723) ​Reforming theologian and Hebraist at Halle, defended the university’s Pietists against Christian ἀ omasius; Chapter 6.3; see Arndt, Pietism, Spener. frenzy ​“Frenzies sung by Plato” are paths of ascent in Orat. 27–28; see ecstasy, erôs. friendship ​A philosophical “friendship of the single-­souled” is a phase of ascent at Orat. 24–25; Chapter 12.2; see concord, peace. Gabriel and Michael ​Warring archangels; Michael, Love, or Piety (S4), the sefirotic ­Water in the South; and Gabriel, Judgment (S5), the Fire in the North; reconciled by the Heavens (S6), the Sefirah who is also Jacob, Jesus and Beauty; Chapter 11.5; see directions, ladder, shamayim, Tiferet. Gaffarel, Jacques (1601–1681) ​Priest and scholar, hired by Cardinal Richelieu as a book hunter, described Kabbalist manuscripts once owned by Pico; Chapter 6.2. Garcia, Pedro (ca. 1440–1505) ​Spanish theologian educated in Paris, absentee bishop of Ales in Sardinia, in the retinue of Cardinal Rodrigo de Borja when he served on the commission that interrogated Pico in 1487. Garin, Eugenio (1909–2004) ​Supported by Gentile and Papini ­until ­a fter World War II, taught philosophy in Florence and Pisa, directed Italy’s National Institute for Re­nais­sance Studies, led the field in Eu­rope, as Kristeller did in the Anglophone world; Chapters 3, 4, 10.4. gematria  ​Numerical values of Hebrew letters and words, especially in the Bible, are treated as carriers of meaning ­because all Hebrew letters are also numerals; Chapter 11.1. General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act  ​Gentile’s 1916 book on idealist metaphysics; Chapter 4.2; see actualism. Gentile, Giovanni (1875–1944) ​Fascist and phi­los­o­pher who ­shaped the ­grand narrative of the history of philosophy in Italy and secured Pico’s place in it;

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Chapters 3, 4; see actualism, autoctisis, concreteness, Croce, Garin, Giornale Critico, Kingdom of Man, La Critica, Mussolini, pensiero pensante, philosophy of the Spirit. Gersonides (1288–1344) ​Levi ben Gerson, Ralbag, worked in Provence and applied his Aristotelian naturalism and rationalism to interpreting the Bible; Chapters 11.1, 12.2. Ghiberti, Lorenzo (1378–1455) ​Florentine artist and architect, finished a ‘Gate of Paradise’ for the baptistry of his city’s main church in 1452; see Brunelleschi. Gikatilla, Joseph (1238–1405) ​Student of Abulafia; Flavius translated his books; the title of his first, ἀ e Nut Garden, is an acronym for manipulating Hebrew letters as numerals; Chapter 12.4; see numerology. Gioberti, Vincenzo (1801–1852) ​Philosopher, champion of Italy’s cultural primacy, and opponent of ­Father Antonio Rosmini in a formative dispute that inspired Gentile’s politicized idealism; Chapter 3.6; see actualism. Giorgio (Zorzi), Francesco (1460–1540) ​Franciscan theologian, traced ideas of cosmic harmony to ancient theologians studied by Ficino and also to Pico’s Kabbalah; Chapter 6.2. Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana ​Journal founded in 1920 by Gentile to declare in­de­pen­dence from Croce; its title page still carries the found­er’s name. Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1267–1337) ​Tuscan artist and architect, took the Italian Gothic in new directions, especially to depict h ­ uman psy­chol­ogy. Giovio, Paolo (1483–1552) ​Historian and biographer, bishop of Nocera in 1528, built a picture gallery for his palace at Como; Chapter 5.9. Gnostics ​Considered heretics by early Christians ­because of fantastic theologies and eschatologies that authenticated physical and metaphysical pessimism; Chapter 10.3. goêteia ​A Greek word for ‘magic,’ usually pejorative, while mageia is often neutral or approving, as in Orat. 56; Chapter 13.1; see demonic magic, natu­ral magic. Gorgias of Leontini (ca. 485–ca. 380) ​Teacher of rhe­toric attacked by Plato as an ­enemy of philosophy in a dialogue named for him. Grassi, Ernesto (1902–1991) ​Italian phi­los­o­pher, studied with Heidegger ­a fter 1928 while staying in touch with Croce, then taught at German universities and in 1938 founded an Institute ­t here that published Italienische Humanismus by Garin in 1947; Chapters 3.9, 4.2–3. Greswell, William Parr (1765–1854) ​Anglican cleric and scholar whose epistolary biographies of Pico and Poliziano had ­little influence; Chapter 9.1.



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Hallam, Henry (1777–1859) ​Historian of the medieval state, the En­glish constitution, and early-­modern Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture; Chapter 9.3. Hamann, Johann Georg (1730–1788) ​Editor, journalist, and tutor, produced original theology and a striking response to Kant’s first Critique; Chapter 7.2. Hammer of Witches  ​Malleus maleficarum, a manual for witch-­hunters, published in 1486 while Pico was drafting his Conclusions, carried a letter written two years e­ arlier by Innocent VIII; Chapters 12.5, 13.2; see Cibo. Heptaplus ​Pico’s exegesis of the days of Creation, prob­ably published in 1489, Kabbalist but not explic­itly so. Hermes Trismegistus ​Greek name of an Egyptian god attached to ‘theoretical’ treatises on spirituality during the early Christian era and to ‘technical’ manuals of magic during the M ­ iddle Ages; this ancient theologian (Orat. 52) instructs his disciple Asclepius (Orat. 1) but never appears in Pico’s account of magic; Chapter 13.1; see Aesculapius, Asklepios, Hermetica. Hermetica ​Although Ficino put Greek ‘theoretical’ Hermetica into Latin in 1463, the Asclepius had been read in that language since late antiquity; see Asklepios, Hermes Trismegistus. Heumann, Christoph (1681–1764) ​Translator of the New Testament and critic of Lutheran orthodoxy, launched Acta Philosophorum in 1715 to promote eclecticism and won a chair of theology at Göttingen a­ fter opposing an appointment for Wolff; Chapter 6.1. hidden God ​The God of the Areopagite’s negative theology—­t he “darkness” at Orat. 7—is hidden ­because he is the subject of no true assertions, only of negative statements; Chapter 12.1, 3. Hölderlin, Friedrich (1770–1843) ​Romantic poet and novelist and a talented phi­los­o­pher, close to Fichte and impor­tant for Hegel, Schelling, and Schiller. Horn, Georg (1620–1670) ​Studied theology at Leiden, won a chair in history, and died insane; fascinated by chronology and periodization; Chapter 6.1. humanism ​Equivocal word, both a modern, secularist ideology and also the classicism of premodern thinkers who ­were devout Christians; Chapter 4.4. Iamblichus of Chalcis (ca. 245–325 CE) ​Syrian phi­los­o­pher, prob­ably studied in Rome with Porphyry before g­ oing home to teach a Platonic curriculum, compile Pythagorean wisdom, debate Porphyry about magic, and introduce Neoplatonists to the Chaldean Oracles; mentioned at Orat. 48 and 69 and pre­sent throughout the speech; Chapters 11.4; 12.3, 6; 13.1. Ibn Ezra, Abraham (1093–1167) ​Left Spain in 1140 for Rome and elsewhere, well known for handbooks of astronomy and other subjects as well as commentaries on the Bible and other books, perhaps including the Sefer Yetzirah, a text revered by Kabbalists.

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Appendix D

image and likeness ​Medieval interpretations of ­t hese words from Gen. 1:26 informed Christian conceptions of dignitas; Chapters 1.5, 11.4. impregnation ​Abulafia’s image for the pro­cess of conjunction with the Shekinah (S10); Chapter 11.2. Innocent III, Pope ​See Lotario dei Segni. Innocent VIII, Pope ​From 1484 to 1492, during most of Pico’s adult life; see Cibò; Hammer of Witches. innovation ​Orat. 54 announces a “new philosophy”; Chapter 12.6. irascible ​ See appetitive and irascible. Isaac ​See Abraham. Jacob ​See ­Fathers, ladder. Jacobi, Friedrich (1743–1819) ​Philosopher and cultural critic, his responses to Goethe, Kant, Lessing, and Mendelssohn, especially on Hume and Spinoza, ­shaped the development of Romanticism; Chapter 7.2; see Hamann. Jansenism ​Puritanical variant, mainly French, of Roman Catholicism, with a theology of grace and h ­ uman ­w ill opposed by the Jesuits in a conflict with far-­reaching consequences. Jesup, Edward ​See Chapter 5.9. Jesus Nave ​See Joshua. ­ athers. Job ​See Bildad, Elihu, F Joshua ​Son of Nun and commander of Israel’s troops ­a fter Moses died. Judgment ​ Orat. 13–14 associates Judgment (S5) with ἀ rones; Chapter 12.4; see Abraham, Cherubim, Gabriel. jynxes ​Magical birds or toys or instruments, the “inborn charms” of Orat. 60; see Chapter 13.1. Kepler, Johann (1571–1630) ​Mathematician, astronomer, and supporter of Galileo whose laws of planetary motion w ­ ere fundamental to the new science of his time. Kingdom  ​Malkuth, a name of S10; see Shekinah. Kingdom of Ends ​Kant’s ideal community of rational agents who legislate universal laws to which they are subject; Chapter 1.3. Kingdom of Man ​Gentile borrowed the phrase regnum hominis from Francis Bacon to label his neo-­Hegelian conception of ­human agency as overcoming nature’s constraints by spiritualizing the world; Chapter 3.6, 9. kiss ​“What Kabbalists say about the death of the kiss,” as in T2Z7 and K11, is a theme of Orat. 25; a blessing for the philosophical soul that “dies in herself that she might live in her spouse”; Chapters 11.2, 12.2; see body, death, mystical ­union, practicing death.



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Knowledge ​An aspect of the highest Sefirah (S1), above Wisdom (S2) and Understanding (S3); Chapter 11.1. Kristeller, Paul (1905–1999) ​With help from Gentile, he left Eu­rope in 1939, taught philosophy at Columbia University, and led the field of Re­nais­sance studies in the Anglophone world; see Garin. La Critica ​Journal founded in 1903 by Croce in a partnership with Gentile that lasted ­u ntil 1923; the publication kept ­going without Gentile ­u ntil 1944. ladder ​At Orat. 19 “angels speeding up and down Jacob’s ladder” illustrate the possibility of mystical ascent; see curriculum, regimen. Laterza, Giovanni (1873–1943) ​Publisher who launched La Critica in Bari, prospered, and stayed close to Croce through the Fascist period but broke with Gentile. Lavelle, Louis (1883–1951) ​French Protestant phi­los­o­pher, before and ­a fter World War II, whose work resonated with existentialism’s concerns about h ­ uman suff ering and responsibility; Chapter 4.3; see Lesenne. Lee, Vernon ​See Violet Paget. Lesenne, René (1882–1954) ​Concerns with duty and personal identity linked him with existentialism, but his metaphysics, like Lavelle’s, was not atheist. Lessing, Gotthold (1729–1781) ​Educated in philosophy and theology, often unemployed u ­ ntil he became librarian at Wolfenbüttel in 1770 and an icon of literary culture in Enlightened Germany; Chapter 7.2. letters ​Seeing Hebrew as the language that God used to speak the universe into being, Kabbalists saw meaning in e­ very letter of the alphabet, as in T1K33 and T2K56; Chapter 11.1; see gematria, zeh and zot. Llull, Ramon (1232–1316) ​Born in Majorca ­under Muslim rule, became a Franciscan friar, and wrote with enormous ambition and considerable influence about a system of universal knowledge. Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492) ​­After 1469 ­until his death, hence during most of Pico’s adult life, the Magnifico dominated Florence’s politics and ­shaped the city’s culture; see Cosimo de’ Medici. Lotario dei Segni, Cardinal (ca. 1160–1216) ​Three years before he was elected pope in 1198 as Innocent III, the Cardinal wrote his enormously influential Wretchedness of the H ­ uman Condition; Chapter 1.6. Luporini, Cesare (1909–1993) ​Italian existentialist and Marxist phi­los­o­pher; Chapter 4.3. madness ​See frenzy. mageia, magic ​See goêteia, natu­ral magic; Chapter 13.1.

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Appendix D

Magi ​Wise men from the East in the Christmas story, likewise at Orat. 56, where a magus is a pious expert on religion—­also on magic at Orat. 67; Chapter 13.3; see Chaldean, natu­ral magic, Zoroaster. Magnifico ​See Lorenzo de’ Medici. Maimonides (1138–1204) ​Moshe ben Maimon, Rambam, the supreme rabbinic authority of his time, also the greatest Jewish phi­los­o­pher; some Kabbalists—­ like Pico (T2K63)—­believed that he was one of them; Chapter 11.1. Manetti, Giannozzo (1396–1459) ​Florentine scholar and diplomat, his book On ­Human Worth and Excellence was the fullest treatment of dignitas in the Quattrocento: Chapter 1.4. Manfredo, heirs of ​Medieval and ­later chronicles hailed Manfredo and Euride, descended from Emperor Constantine, as progenitors of the Pico f­ amily; Chapters 1.1, 7.1; see Bratti. Margherita ​Wife of Giuliano di Mariotto di Medici, a lesser Medici cousin, briefly abducted by Pico in May of 1486. Martí, Ramón ​In his Dagger of Faith, first printed in 1651, this thirteenth-­ century Dominican from Catalonia used rabbinical texts to argue that Jesus was the Messiah. Masoretes ​­After the seventh ­century, scholars edited the Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Bible by adding vowel points and other signs not pre­sent in copies meant for liturgical and devotional use. mathe­matics ​Pico’s Conclusions include questions to “answer with numbers,” based on his unconventional view of mathe­matics; App. 3.15; Chapter 12.6; see numerology. Matilda of Canossa, Countess (1046–1115) ​Supported the papacy against the emperors, especially in the north of Italy; Chapters 1.1, 7.1; see Bratti. Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805–1872) ​Long an exile in ­England, inspired the strug­gle for Italian in­de­pen­dence and unity while promoting demo­cratic and republican ideals. Meiners, Christoph (1747–1810) ​Professor of philosophy at Göttingen, opposed to Kant, prolific writer, mainly about historical topics, and a notorious racist; Chapter 8.1. Mendelssohn, Moses (1729–1786) ​Enlightenment phi­los­o­pher, wrote influentially about immortality, the existence of God, and other topics; translated the Bible, defended Judaism as rational, and was barred as a Jew from the Prus­sian Acad­emy; Chapter 7.2. Metatron ​The mightiest angel, sometimes the Agent Intellect, a model for mystical ­union b ­ ecause he was once a ­human, Enoch, as at Orat. 8; Chapter 11.4.



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metempsychosis ​A ­human soul survives the death of the body and animates a dif­fer­ent body that may or may not be ­human; Orat. 8–9; Chapter 11.4; see Empedocles. Michael ​See Gabriel and Michael. Midrash ​Rabbis of the first through the fifth centuries made interpretations—­ sometimes narrative, sometimes expository—of scriptural and other sacred texts to find deeper meanings. Mishnah ​See Talmud. Mitford, Jessica (1917–1996) ​Left-­w ing journalist with right-­w ing relatives, wrote hilariously about them and in 1963 about ἀ e American Way of Death. Modernism ​Pope Pius X titled his 1907 encyclical On the Teachings of Modernists, giving Vatican cover to a slogan of reactionary Catholicism. More, Henry (1614–1687) ​Philosopher and poet, first used ‘theosophy’ as a pejorative, though the word fits his own esoteric spiritualism, including Christian Kabbalah; Chapter 5.9. More, Thomas (1478–1535) ​Canonized five centuries ­a fter his execution for treason by Henry VIII, whom he had served as lord chancellor; published his Latin Utopia in 1516; Chapter 5.1; see Erasmus. Morhof, Georg (1639–1691) ​Poet, the first professor of lit­er­a­ture at Kiel, wrote a comprehensive miscellany of higher learning which he titled the Polyhistor; Chapter 5.9. Mortara, Edgardo (1851–1940) ​Jewish boy kidnapped at six years old by papal police a­ fter a Christian servant claimed that she had baptized him; when Pius IX permitted him to be kept in Rome’s church of Saint Peter in Chains, an international furor erupted; Chapter 3.3; see blood libel, Oreglia. Moses ​See ­Fathers. Muratori, Ludovico (1672–1750) ​A priest supported by the Este court who recorded im­mense quantities of data about medieval history that revealed the Church’s misbehavior in Italy; Chapter 7.1. Mussolini, Benito (1883–1945) ​His movement, first called ‘Fascist’ in 1915, was well or­ga­nized by 1920, formed a government in 1922, and became dictatorial in 1925. mystery  ​Orat. 35 discloses what the speech conceals, “hidden interpretations of deep meaning” which are “mysteries of Kabbalah”; T2K63; Chapter 11.1; see esoteric. mystical ­union ​The goal of ascent is total u ­ nion with God, eliminating the individual person; Chapter 11.2; see body, death, completion, conjunction, peace. mysticism ​ See mystical ­union.

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Appendix D

Nahmanides (1194–1270) ​Moses ben Nahman, Ramban, taught Talmud and Kabbalah in Spain at Gerona. names ​Theorizing about names of God, telling stories about Sefirot ­under vari­ous names, and examining mystical uses of such names ­were all methods of Kabbalah, as in T2K6 on “three g­ reat fourfold names of God”; Chapter 11.1; see theosophy. natu­ral magic ​At Orat. 56, the “final realization of natu­ral philosophy” is good magic ­because, unlike goêteia, this magic does not rely on demons; Chapter 13.1; see demonic magic. natu­ral philosophy ​A prelude to theology that informs the ascending soul about the natu­ral world at Orat. 16 but cannot complete the journey; Chapter 11.4; see curriculum, ladder, regimen. natu­ral theology ​From observations and intuitions about the natu­ral world, rational procedures derive conclusions about God’s existence and properties; Chapter 12.3. Naudé, Gabriel (1600–1653) ​Intellectual and librarian, displayed rationalist ideals and skeptical instincts in his Instruction to France on the True Story of ­ reat ­People Falsely the Rosicrucians (1623) and his Apology for All the G Accused of Magic (1625). Neoplatonism  ​Iamblichus, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, and Synesius ­were leading figures in a tradition that continued through the eleventh ­century and also produced impor­tant commentaries on Aristotle; Orat. 48; Chapter 12.6; see Dionysius the Areopagite, remaining. Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) ​German phi­los­o­pher and theologian of ­great originality, also a power­f ul cardinal. North, South, East, West ​Names of Sefirot; see directions. Numerations ​Pico’s Latin for Sefirot, numerationes, or ‘countings,’ as in T1K33; Chapter 11.1. numerology ​The “method of number,” a key component of Pico’s Kabbalah, as at T2K65, and of other ancient theologies; numbers of special importance to Pico ­were 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 40, 50, 70, 72, 86, 600, and 900; Chapter 11.1; see gematria, letters, mathe­matics, tetractys. Nuremberg Chronicles ​See Chronicles. Olearius, Gottfried (1672–1715) ​Taught classics, philosophy, and theology in Leipzig. Oreglia, Giuseppe (1823–1895) ​A founder of the Jesuit magazine Civiltà Cattolica and an avid anti-­Jewish propagandist on behalf of the papacy; Chapter 3.3; see blood libel, Edgardo Mortara, San Simonino.



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519

Orphic Hymns ​The “Orphic theology” is primordial at Orat. 69, but the earliest fragments of Orphic theogonies are from the fifth c­ entury BCE, and the Hymns are from imperial times; Chapter 13.3; see ancient theologians, Chaldean Oracles. Paget, Violet (1856–1935) ​Writing as Vernon Lee and living mainly in Italy, published fiction and nonfiction, especially art criticism and aesthetics, focusing on the eigh­teenth ­century but also promoting the Florentine Re­nais­sance; Chapter 9.3. Pallas Athena ​At T2K10, Pallas is Metatron, at Orat. 15 the “knot of primary minds”—­t he highest angels—­and the guardian of philosophical contemplation; Chapter 11.5; see Agent Intellect. Papazzoni, Battista (d. 1561) ​Continued Ingramo Bratti’s chronicle; Chapter 1.1. Papini, Giovanni (1881–1956) ​Avant-­garde intellectual before World War I, then a right-­w ing Catholic, a favorite of Mussolini’s regime, and director of a new Center (­later National Institute) for Re­nais­sance Studies in 1937; Chapter 3.1, 9; see Garin, Gentile. Paracelsus (1493–1541) ​Name acquired by Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, a Swabian and Swiss physician with deep religious passions who challenged the norms of medicine. paradise ​ p-­r-­d-­s is a rabbinical acronym for levels of biblical interpretation, as at Orat. 33; Chapter 12; see Eden’s rivers. Pascal, Blaise (1623–1662) ​­After 1654 his devotion to Jansenist spirituality ended his creative work in mathe­matics and physics but inspired the aphorisms published posthumously as the Pensées; Chapter 5.9. Pater, Walter (1839–1894) ​Read classics at Oxford, began publishing in 1866 while a fellow at Brasenose, and developed the aestheticism that led to charges of hedonism and hampered his university ­career ­a fter his essays on Re­nais­ sance art appeared as a book in 1867; Chapters 1.3, 9.1. peace ​The “peace that God makes on high” (Orat. 20–25; T1K24) turns ­humans into angels on the way up to mystical ­union; Chapter 12.2; see concord, friendship. pensiero pensante ​‘Thought thinking’ was a key notion of Gentile’s actualism; Chapter 4.1. Perotti, Nicolò (1429–1480) ​Classicist, archbishop of Siponto, and papal secretary whose concordance to Martial is also an encyclopedic work of reference. Persians  ​Chaldean followers of Zoroaster taught the good (natu­ral) magic promoted by the Oration; Orat. 10, 57–58; Chapter 13. philosophy of the Spirit ​In the tradition of Hegelian idealism, both Croce and Gentile developed philosophies of the Spirit (Geist) but with conflicting aims and results.

520

Appendix D

Phoenix ​A mythical bird that enjoys a kind of immortality; Chapter 1.1. piagnone ​A ‘weeper’ or follower of Savonarola, especially in Florence of the 1490s. Pico Box ​A visual form containing extravagant words of praise about Pico, in the United States often appearing in university textbooks ­a fter World War II; Chapter 1.2, 5.9. Picus ​A divine ancestral Roman in poems by Ovid and Vergil; Chapter 1.1. Pietism ​A movement of Protestant Christians, starting in the late seventeenth ­century, who preferred a religion of the heart to intellectualist Lutheran orthodoxy; Chapter 6.3; see Arndt, Francke, Schwärmerei, Spener, ἀ omasius. Piety ​See Gabriel and Michael. Pippa of Asolo ​Title character of Robert Browning’s verse-­drama of 1841, a textile worker whose singing expresses the redemptive power of innocence; Chapter 9.2. plants, cutting off the  ​Sefirot are Plants, and, in the story of Eden’s trees, the primal sin is the dividing of Unity that must not be broken or cut off . Pletho, Gemistos (ca. 1355–ca. 1450) ​Phi­los­o­pher from Mistra in Greece who came to Italy in 1438 as the Byzantine emperor’s adviser, inspiring some Italians to study Plato but off ending ­others with po­liti­cal and religious novelties. Pliny the Elder ​Magic was one of many subjects covered by the encyclopedic Natu­ral History that he wrote in the first c­ entury CE; Chapter 13.1. Plotinus ​Egyptian phi­los­o­pher, taught Porphyry in Rome in the m ­ iddle of the third c­ entury CE; “in terms far beyond ­human” (Orat. 48), he theorized about magic and urged his students to become divine by transcending individual embodiment; Chapters 11.2, 12.2; see Neoplatonism. Plutarch of Chaeronea (ca. 45–120 CE) ​Eclectic Platonist, studied philosophy in Athens with a teacher named Ammonius, became a priest at Apollo’s shrine in Delphi, and wrote essays about his experience; Chapter 12.3. poetic theology ​See ancient theologians. Poliziano, Angelo Ambrogini (1454–1494) ​Pioneer of modern philology, wrote memorable poetry in the volgare and Latin, professor of Latin and Greek in Florence a­ fter 1480; Chapter 1.1. polyhistory ​See Morhof. Pomponazzi, Pietro (1462–1525) ​Studied with Nicoletto Vernia at Padua, taught natu­ral philosophy ­t here and at Ferrara and Bologna, challenged the Church’s position on the soul’s immortality. Pontano, Giovanni (1429–­1503) ​Poet, politician, and scholar supported by the royal court of Naples.



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Popu­lar Philosophy ​Some German phi­los­o­phers promoted Enlightenment by trying to make philosophy accessible and practical. Porphyry (ca. 234–ca. 305 CE) ​Syrian phi­los­o­pher, studied with Plotinus in Rome, may have taught Iamblichus but disagreed with him about the roles of religion and magic in philosophy; see Neoplatonism. Postel, Guillaume (1510–1581) ​Traveler, linguist, and utopian visionary, first professor of Oriental languages at the Collège de France, victim of the Inquisition for advocating universal religious toleration. practicing death ​As in Orat. 25, Socrates taught that phi­los­o­phers should practice for death in order to release the soul from its body, a prison and tomb; Chapter 12.2; see asceticism, kiss, withdrawal. Pre-­Raphaelite Brotherhood ​In 1848, defying the Royal Acad­emy, seven found­ers of the PRB drew a line before Raphael while imitating Italian art of the Quattrocento and e­ arlier; Chapter 9.2. Proclus (ca. 412–485) ​The subject of 55 of Pico’s ­theses, this last creative phi­los­o­ pher among the Neoplatonists wrote detailed commentaries on Plato’s dialogues as well as systematic pre­sen­ta­tions of Platonism, focusing on theology and citing the Chaldean Oracles, as in T1Prc31; Chapter 12.6. proposition ​See thesis. Proteus ​In the Odyssey a minor sea-­god who changes shape to escape a captor’s questions; his “self-­changing nature” represents mutability at Orat. 6; Chapter 11.4. Pugin, Augustus Welby (1812–1852) ​Architect, critic, and son of an architect, became a Roman Catholic in 1835, a year before publishing Contrasts, a manifesto for Gothic style, whose princi­ples he applied in designs for the ­houses of Parliament; Chapter 9.2. Pythagoras ​None of the ancient ­Fathers is more vis­i­ble in the Oration, linked with metempsychosis (Orat. 8), philosophical friendship (24), mystical ascent (31–32), numerology (55), natu­ral magic (57–58), secrecy (65), and Orphic theology (69); Chapter 12.3; see ancient theologians, esoteric, ­Fathers, friendship. Querelle ​See ­Battle of the Books. Ralbag ​See Gersonnides. Rambam ​See Maimonides. Ramban ​See Nahmanides. Rashbi ​See Shimon ben Yohai; Zohar. Ramée (Ramus), Pierre de la ​Mathematician and phi­los­o­pher, transformed logic and rhe­toric for a ­century ­a fter he started to publish in the 1540s.

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Raphael ​An angel of healing not named in the Hebrew Bible (and just once in Pico’s speech at Orat. 35), though the apocryphal story about him was popu­lar and a frequent subject for painting; Chapter 12.4. Rashi (1040–1105) ​Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac of Troyes studied in Germany with Ashkenazi authorities and wrote the standard medieval commentary on the Torah. Recanati, Menahem (fl. 1290) ​His Kabbalist commentaries on the daily prayers and the Torah, both translated by Flavius, gave Pico access to Zoharic Kabbalah, though the Torah commentary survives only in the original; Chapter 11.1. reception ​At Orat. 66, Kabbalah is “the Hebrew word for our reception”; Chapter 13.2. regimen ​The ­whole ascent is practical as well as theoretical, more intellectual and curricular at lower levels, more experiential at higher levels; Chapter 11.4; see ladder. regnum hominis ​See Kingdom of Man. Reinhold, Karl (1757–1823) ​A Jesuit, ­later a Protestant and a Mason, held the first university chair devoted to Kant’s philosophy, which he pop­u ­lar­ized but also criticized; Chapter 7.2. Reisch, Gregor (1470–1525) ​Carthusian monk whose Philosophical Pearl (Margarita philosophica, 1503) was an encyclopedic digest of the university curriculum with striking woodcuts. remaining, pro­cession, reversion ​Plotinus conceived of hypostatic emanation as moments made explicit in this triad by l­ ater Neoplatonists; Chapter 12.1. Re­nais­sance Philosophy of Man ​ Phoenix Books Number 1, published in 1948 by the University of Chicago Press, introduced Pico’s Oration to a large Anglophone readership; Chapter 1.1–2. revolving the alphabet ​“Knowing how to revolve the alphabet,” as in T2K2, was meant to achieve ecstasy by chanting sequences of letters from the Hebrew alphabet vocalized in ritually meaningful ways; Chapter 13.2; see names, numerology. Ritter, August Heinrich (1791–1869) ​Educated at Göttingen, where he also held his last position, finishing a History of Philosophy in twelve volumes in 1853; Chapter 8.2. Roscoe, William (1753–1831) ​Progressive politician, MP for Liverpool, patron of public cultural institutions, and popu­lar writer about the Re­nais­sance; Chapter 9.1. Rosicrucians ​As of the early seventeenth ­century, not a well-­organized group but a hoax perpetrated in the name of universal reform that publicized vague notions of magic and Kabbalah; see Gaffarel, Naudé.



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Rosmini, Antonio (1797–1855) ​See Gioberti. Rosselli, Cosimo (1439–1507) ​Florentine painter, created altar pieces and frescoes in Tuscany and also for the Sistine Chapel in Rome; Chapter 9.3. Rucellai ​Florentine ­family, grew rich enough in the wool trade ­a fter the thirteenth ­century to employ Alberti as an architect in the Quattrocento; Chapter 9.2. Ruskin, John (1819–1900) ​Victorian ­England’s most influential critic of the arts and society, promoted the pre-­Raphaelites, hence the Quattrocento, but disliked ­later Re­nais­sance architecture and painting; Chapter 9.2. Saitta, Giuseppe (1881–1965) ​Proponent of Gentile’s actualism, taught philosophy at Bologna; Chapter 3.8. Savonarola Brown ​Title character of a story by Max Beerbohm; Chapter 9.1. Savonarola, Girolamo (1452–1498) ​Dominican friar and preacher, prior of San Marco in Florence in 1491, dominated the city’s politics a­ fter 1494, excommunicated in 1497, burned in 1498 in front of the Signoria. Schedel, Hartman (1440–1514) ​Physician from Nuremberg, educated in Italy, principal author of the Chronicles published in his city in 1493; Chapter 1.2. Schiller, Friedrich (1759–1805) ​Studied medicine and read Kant ­until fame as a playwright led him to journalism; won support from Goethe in Weimar ­a fter he had written on aesthetics; Chapter 7.3. Schwärmerei ​“The complete dethroning of reason” in religion, according to Kant; Pico’s critics in the Enlightenment and l­ ater called Pico a Schwärmer; Chapter 7.2; see Pietism. secrecy ​See esoteric. Sefirot ​Singular Sefirah; activities, aspects, emanations, or features of God hypostasized and mythologized in stories told by Kabbalists; Chapter 11.1; see theosophy. Seraphim ​See Cherubim. Sforza ​­After Francesco Sforza became Duke of Milan in 1450, his branch of the ­family lasted for a c­ entury, ­doing ­great deeds and misdeeds in politics and culture. Shabbetai Zevi (1626–1676) ​­After a traditional education in Talmud, studied Kabbalah and claimed to be the Messiah ­until he was forced to convert to Islam, meanwhile attracting many followers, most of whom w ­ ere appalled by his apostasy. shamayim ​‘Heavens’ in Hebrew, often read as ’esh (fire) + mayim (­water), so that “the heavens are made of Fire and ­Water” in T2K67; Chapter 11.5.

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Shekinah ​Post-­biblical word for ‘dwelling’ and a rabbinic name of God, indicating the divine presence; in Kabbalah the tenth Sefirah (S10), also called the Kingdom, a divine ­woman who descends ­toward exile in lower worlds of creation; Chapter 11.2; see Sefirot. Shimon ben Yohai ​Rashbi, author of the Zohar, according to legend; Chapter 13.2. Sigwart, Christoph (1830–1904) ​A Tübingen logician whose early work dealt with Zwingli and Spinoza; Chapter 8.2; see Dreydorff. Simonino, San (d. 1475) ​In 1475, allegedly the infant victim of ritual murder by Jews in Trent; Chapter 3.3; see blood libel, Mortara, Oreglia. Sisto da Siena (1520–1569) ​Biblical scholar and convert from Judaism whose adventures allegedly caused him to switch from the Franciscans to the Dominicans; his influential Biblioteca sancta was published in 1566; Chapter 6.2. Skinner, Burrhus Frederic (1904–1990) ​In 1948, when his novel Walden Two appeared, this leading voice of behaviorism moved to Harvard and published Beyond Freedom and Dignity in 1971; Chapter 1.9. Spaventa, Bertrando (1817–1883) ​­After leaving the priesthood in 1850, tormented the Jesuits as a journalist, then taught philosophy at Bologna and Naples while introducing Hegel to Italy; Chapter 3.5–6; see Gentile. Spener, Phillip (1635–1705) ​­After reading Arndt, studied theology and history at Strasbourg, became pastor in Frankfurt am Main, turned his congregation into a Pietist conventicle, and published Pia desideria in 1675; Chapter 6.3; see Francke, Pietism. Stanley, Thomas (1625–1678) ​Royalist poet and classicist, went to France during the Civil War, published Poems and Translations in 1647, the first part of a History of Philosophy in 1655, and an edition and translation of Aeschylus in 1663; Chapter 6.1. Strauss, Leo (1899–1973) ​Political theorist at the University of Chicago who attracted disciples to a conservative conception of intellectual tradition, based on notions of esoteric reading and writing. Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772) ​­A fter a distinguished ­career in engineering and science, he interpreted the Bible in light of visions of angels and other spirits, inspiring followers to or­ga­nize Swedenborgian churches; Chapter 6.2. Symonds, John Addington (1840–1893) ​Educated at Balliol, fellow of Magdalen, homosexual but married to a ­woman and fathered ­children, attacked for writing about Greek pederasty, and from 1875 to 1886 published the most popu­lar account of the Re­nais­sance ever written in En­g lish; Chapter 9.1.



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syncretism ​Polemical target of philosophical eclectics who forbade any mixing of ideas (like Pico’s concordia) that might inhibit a selective search for truth in the historical rec­ord; Chapter 6.1; see concord, friendship, peace. Synesius of Cyrene (ca. 370–413) ​Christian bishop well educated in Neoplatonic philosophy, including teachings about magic; Chapter 13.1; see jynxes. Syriac ​A dialect of Aramaic; see Chaldean. Tabernacle ​When the Israelites left Egypt to reach the Promised Land, they carried a tent (not a fixed ­temple) for God to dwell in; Kabbalists treated its structure and contents, described in the Torah, as sacred symbols, as in T2Z9; Chapter 12.3. Talmud ​In Babylon and Palestine, between the third and seventh centuries CE, rabbis commented twice and in g­ reat detail on a ­legal code, the Mishnah, which originated before the third c­ entury; T2K21 mentions the Talmud. Targums ​Translations into Aramaic and Syriac of most of the Hebrew Bible, made from the first through seventh centuries CE and adding vari­ous ele­ments of interpretation. Tennemann, Wilhelm (1761–1819) ​­After opposing Kant on psy­chol­ogy, he applied the critical philosophy to Plato and began his History of Philosophy in 1798 while teaching at Jena, then moved to Marburg to replace Tiedemann; Chapters 1.3, 8.1. tetractys ​A Pythagorean amulet showing an equilateral triangle made of 10 points in 4 rows; Chapter 12.1; see figural number, numerology. Tetragrammaton ​Greek word for the holiest name of God, written with four Hebrew letters, yh vh , as in T2K6, so sacred that it may not be spoken; Chapter 13.2. Themistius (ca. 317–ca. 388) ​Rhetorician, wrote commentaries on Aristotle, straightforward by the standards of l­ ater Neoplatonism, and influential through Pico’s time and l­ ater. theosophy ​Kabbalah that tells stories about the Sefirot is often called ‘theosophical,’ using a word coined in En­glish by Henry More; Chapters 11.2, 13.1; see names. thesis ​In the universities of Pico’s time, an impor­tant teaching method was to debate (dispute) philosophical propositions or ­t heses, like the “vast number of propositions” (Orat. 44) in the prince’s ill-­fated book; Chapter 12.5. theurgy ​A magical working (ergon) or acting on the divine, by drawing gods down into statues, by ascending to the divine, or even by causing divinity to change, as in the practice of sefirotic Kabbalah; Chapters 11.2, 13.1. Thomasius, Christian (1655–1728) ​Early champion of Enlightenment in Germany, ­lawyer, and public intellectual, campaigned to secularize politics while opposing Lutheran orthodoxy, promoting natu­ral law in jurisprudence and

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supporting eclecticism in philosophy; Chapter 6.1; see Francke, Pietism, Jakob ἀ omasius, Wolff. Thomasius, Jakob (1622–1684) ​­Father of Christian ἀ omasius, taught rhe­toric and ethics at Leipzig, where Leibniz was his student; Chapter 6.1. Throne ​At Orat. 17, Jacob’s “image is carved in the Glory Seat”—­God’s Throne, which in Ezekiel’s visions is a wheeled Chariot; Chapter 12.1; see Account of the Chariot. Thrones ​Firm Judgment, a foundation for higher Cherubic contemplation, is the duty of ­t hese angels at Orat. 11–14; Chapter 11.5. Tiedemann, Dieterich (1748–1803) ​Studied at Göttingen, taught classics ­t here and then philosophy at Marburg, disliked Kant’s system, and finished a six-­ volume History of ἀ eoretical Philosophy in 1797; Chapter 8.1. Tiferet ​Beauty (S6) in T1K10 is the “­great Adam,” who is also Jesus in Pico’s Christian Kabbalah; Chapter 11.3. Tiraboschi, Girolamo (1731–1794) ​­After the Society of Jesus was suppressed, this Jesuit scholar directed the Este ­family’s library in Modena while writing the first comprehensive history of Italian lit­er­a­ture; Chapter 7.1. Toffanin, Giuseppe (1891–1980) ​Literary critic, interpreted humanism in light of his own intransigent Catholicism in studies of Re­nais­sance thought and letters; Chapter 3.9. Traherne, Thomas (1637–1674) ​Studied at Oxford ­until 1661, around the time when he accepted Episcopal ordination and wrote his Meditations; his poems ­were not published u ­ ntil 1903; Chapter 3.9. transmigration of souls ​See metempsychosis. Traversari, Ambrogio (1386–1439) ​Classicist monk and ecclesiastical politician who lived in Florence, translated Diogenes Laertius, the Areopagite, and other Greek authors. trees in Eden ​See plants; Chapter 11.2. Trent blood libel ​Chapter 3.3; see San Simonino. Trinity ​At Orat. 68, the first Christian doctrine listed as proved by Kabbalah, according to Pico, and “contained in secrets of Kabbalists” at T2K6; Chapter 13.2. Understanding  ​S3 among the Sefirot; see Knowledge. Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights ​Proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948, a key po­liti­cal and public statement of the modern concept of dignity; Chapter 1.3. Valla, Lorenzo (1407–1457) ​Roman classicist, phi­los­o­pher, and polemicist, worked mainly in Naples, debunked the Donation of Constantine, and challenged scholastic phi­los­o­phers on issues of language and logic.



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Vallardi ​Milanese publishing ­house, founded in the eigh­teenth ­century, with a descendant still active in 2019; published the original version of the History of Italian Philosophy by Garin in 1947; Chapter 4.1. Vallecchi ​Florentine publishing ­house, still active, founded in 1913 in Italy’s golden age of ­little magazines; published Garin’s general History of Philosophy in 1945; Chapter 4.1. Vanini, Giulio Cesare (1585–1619) ​Carmelite phi­los­o­pher, became a Protestant, returned to the Church, and was burned in France for libertine writings. Ve-­zot li-­Yehuda ​ And ἀ is to Yehuda, introduction to Kabbalah by Abulafia translated into Latin for Pico by Flavius; Chapter 11.1. Villari, Pasquale (1826–1917) ​Italian phi­los­o­pher and politician whose studies of Machiavelli and Savonarola ­were widely read in En­glish; Chapter 9.3. visioning ​See epopteia. Warburg, Aby (1866–1929) ​Art historian from Hamburg, his famous library was moved to London in 1933 and is now h ­ oused in the Warburg Institute of the University of London. ­Water ​See Gabriel and Michael. Winckelmann, Johann (1717–1768) ​Looked beyond the explicit content of ancient written texts to develop a notion of style as a classical ideal in art and archaeology. wine ​See drunkenness. Wirszubski, Chaim (1915–1977) ​Israeli classicist, studied the idea of libertas, translated Spinoza, and wrote the book (posthumously published in 1989) that first demonstrated the scope, depth, and complexity of Pico’s use of Kabbalah; Chapter 10.4. Wisdom  ​S2 among the Sefirot; see Knowledge. withdrawal ​To be “withdrawn to the mind’s sanctuary,” as at Orat. 9, was flight from the body on the ladder of ascent; Chapter 11.4; see asceticism, practicing death. Wolf, Johann (1683–1739) ​Studies of Hebrew and related languages led him to compile a Hebrew Library in four volumes (1715–1733), including material on Kabbalah; Chapter 6.2. Wolff, Christian (1679–1654) ​Before Kant, the leading phi­los­o­pher of the German Enlightenment, expert in scholasticism, friend of Leibniz, professor of mathe­ matics at Halle, a rival t­ here of Thomasius, expelled in a dispute about morality and religion by Pietists who called him a Spinozist; Chapter 6.1. Yates, Frances (1899–1981) ​While teaching at the Warburg Institute, claimed in her 1964 book on Bruno (still in print) that the magic promoted by Pico was a

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“Hermetic tradition” (not true) linked with Kabbalah (true) and a step t­ oward modern science—­perhaps true, though not straightforwardly; Chapter 10.3. zeh and zot ​‘This,’ masculine and feminine, in Hebrew, words of deep meaning despite their small size, as in T2K21; Chapter 11.3; see letters, numerology. Zoroaster ​In the Oration, the ancient theologian who wrote the Chaldean Oracles (Orat. 69), teaching self-­k nowledge (31), a curriculum of ascent (33–34), and magic (57–58); Chapter 12.4; App. 3.16; see ­Fathers, Magi, Persians. Zinzendorf, Nikolaus von (1700–1760) ​Saxon nobleman, influenced by Pietism, attracted followers with roots in Bohemia, the Moravian Brethren, whose faith was an even greater aff ront than Pietism to rationalist religious orthodoxy; Chapter 6.3. Zohar, Sefer ha-­ ​The Book of Splendor, compiled in thirteenth-­century Spain in Aramaic by Moshe ben Shem Tov de Leon and ­others, but attributed to Shimon ben Yohai, a second-­century rabbi, pre­sents sefirotic theosophy by commenting on the Torah and other sacred writings; Chapter 11.1; see Bahir.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations for biblical, classical, patristic, rabbinic, medieval, and some other sources follow the examples in LS OCD OLD SBLH

A Greek-­English Lexicon. 1968. Edited by H. Liddell, R. Scott, et  al. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ἀ e Oxford Classical Dictionary. 1996. Edited by S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford Latin Dictionary. 1982. Edited by P. Glare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ἀ e SBL Handbook of Style for Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Early Christian Studies. 1999. Edited by P. Alexander et  al. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson.

Abbreviations for books of Kabbalah and related works in BAV, Vat. Ebr. 189, 190, and 191 (CVE) and cod. Chigi A.VI.190 are based on Wirszubski 1989, 286–292. ­After checking the Vatican manuscripts, I have relied on Wirszubski’s transcriptions throughout and on Saverio Campanini’s help with Abulafia, Ve-­zot. ­Because the Latin version of Recanati, Comm., is lost, I have followed Wirszubski’s En­glish versions from the Hebrew in Recanati 1545. Abulafia, Ve-­zot Incipit summa brevis cabalae quae intitulatur Rabi Ieudae contenta in his propositionibus primis (CVE 190) Secr. De secretis legis (CVE 190) Sitre Tora The original of De secretis legis Lib. red. Liber redemptionis (Chigi A.VI.190) Abraham Axelrad, Corona nominis boni (CVE 190) Axelrad, Cor. Azriel, Quaest. Azriel of Gerona, Quaestiones super decem numerationibus (CVE 190) 529

530

Abbreviations

Bahir ἀ e Book of Bahir: Flavius Mithridates’ Latin Translation, the Hebrew Text and an En­glish Version. 2005. Edited and translated by S. Campanini. Torino: Nino Aragno. Standard form for citations of Talmud: see SBLH b. Sanh. Comentum sepher iesire (CVE 191) Com. SI Commentary on the Ten Sefirot (CVE 191) Comm. Sef. Codici Vaticani Ebraici CVE Eleazar of Worms, De anima (CVE 189) Eleazar, An. Expositio decem numerationum (CVE 191) Expos. decem num. Expositio secretorum punctuationis (CVE 190) Expos. secr. punct. Flavius and Pico, Job Translation by Pico and Flavius, with comments by Pico, of the Book of Job, Cod. Ottob. Lat. 607, fols. 3–62, partly transcribed in Wirszubski 1969 Gersonides, SS Commento al Cantico dei Cantici nella traduzione ebraico-­latina di Flavio Mitridate: Edizione e commento del ms. Vat. Lat. 4273 (cc. 5r–54r). 2009. Edited by M. Andreatta. Florence: Olschki. Gikatilla, Port. Joseph Gikatilla, Portae iustitiae (Chigi A.VI.190) Gates Gates of Light: Sha’are Orah. 1994. Translated by A. Weinstein. Walnut Creek, CA: Bronfman Library of Jewish Classics. This is an En­glish version of the previous entry, Gikatilla, Port. Liber de ordine geneseos (Chigi A.VI.190) Lib. ord. gen. Liber de radicibus (CVE 190) Lib. rad. Midrash ha-­Ne’lam in Zohar MhN Midr. Gen., Exod., ­etc. Standard form for citations of Midrash: see SBLH Nachmanides, Com. SI Comentum sepher iesire (CVE 191) Parch. ἀ e ­Great Parchment: Flavius Mithridates’ Latin Translation, the Hebrew Text and an En­glish Translation. 2004. Edited by G. Busi with S. Bondoni and S. Campanini. Torino: Aragno. Recanati, Comm. Menahem Recanati. 1545. ‫ביאור על התורה‬. Venice. Secr. Liber de secretis orationum et benedictionum Cabalae (CVE 190), now edited and translated by Giacomo Corazzol in Menahem Recanati. 2008. Commentary on the Daily Prayers: Flavius Mithridates’ Latin Translation, the Hebrew Text and an En­glish Version. Torino: Nino Aragno. S1, S2, S3 . . . ​S10 The ten Sefirot in the standard array; see Chapter 10.1 of this book



Abbreviations

531

Secr. leg. Libellus de secretis legis manifestandis (CVE 190) Sefer Yetzirah SY Tg. ps.-­J. standard form for citations of Targums: see SBLH ZLTG ἀ e Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts. 1989. Edited and translated by F. Lachower, I. Tishby, and D. Goldstein. London: Litman Library of Jewish Civilization. Zohar Zohar: Pritzker Edition. 2004–2017. Edited and translated by D. Matt et  al. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Abbreviations for Kant’s works follow Caygill 1995, 5–6. Kant’s text is cited by the page numbers of the Suhrkamp edition, sometimes using or adapting the En­glish of Guyer and Wood 1992–. A CF CJ CpR CPR CT DS EF GMM IUH MM ObS P RL RS WO

Anthropology from a Practical Point of View Conflict of the Faculties Critique of the Power of Judgment Critique of Practical Reason Critique of Pure Reason “A Condescending Tone” Dreams of a Spirit-­Seer “Clarification on Fichte’s Doctrine of Science” Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Idea for a Universal History Metaphysics of Morals Observations on the Sublime Prolegomena for Any ­Future Metaphysics Religion within the Bounds of Reason “Review of Schulz’s Attempt” “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?”

Other abbreviations, including t­ hose for titles given in full in the Bibliography, are Apol. Pico 1487 App. Appendices in this book B Pico 1496 Ba The Latin text of the Oration in Pico 2007 BAV Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana BDB A Hebrew and En­glish Lexicon of the Old Testament. 1951. Edited by F. Brown, S. Driver, and C. Briggs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bausi’s introduction and notes in Pico 2007 Bn

532

Abbreviations

C.H. Corpus Hermeticum Charlesworth ἀ e Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 1983–1985. Edited by J. Charlesworth. 2 vols. New York: Doubleday. Pico 2001 Comm. Concl. Pico 1486 DBI Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, http://­w ww​.­treccani​.­it/ DDDB Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. 1999. Edited by K. Van der Toorn, B. Becking, and P. Van Der Horst. 2nd ed. Leiden: Brill. DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://­w ww​.­oxforddnb​ .­com F MS Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Palatino 885, fols. 143–153, containing a fragment of Pico’s Oration ISTC Incunabula Short-­Title Cata­logue, http://­w ww​.­bl​.­u k​/­catalogues​ /­istc/ GCFI Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana Journal of the History of Ideas JHI Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes JWCI Pico ca. 1489 in the Bibliography Hept. KJV King James Version of the Bible LXX Greek Septuagint Bible Miss. rom. Missale romanum ex decreto sacrosancti oecumenici concilii vaticanii instauratum. 2002. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. MPL Migne, J.-­P. Patrologiae cursus completus, . . . ​series latina. 1841– 1855. Paris. Oxford En­glish Dictionary OED RQ Re­nais­sance Quarterly SEP Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://­plato​.­stanford​.­edu/ TDNTA ἀ eological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One ­ rand Rapids: Eerdmans. Volume. 1985. Edited by G. Bromiley. G T1 The first 400 of Pico’s 900 Conclusions; see App. C The last 500 of Pico’s 900 Conclusions; see App. C T2 TP Platonic ἀ eology, in Ficino 2001–2006 Gianfrancesco Pico’s Life of Pico, in B Vit. Vulg. Latin Vulgate Bible W Wirszubski 1989

Notes

Introduction

1. Copenhaver 1978, 167–168, 233–234; 2000. 2. Copenhaver 1977, 1980, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 2009. 3. Copenhaver 2015a, xiii; 2015b. 4. Copenhaver 2010 for the notion of a ‘philosophical history of philosophy.’ 5. For Craven, see Chapter 10.4 of this book. 6. Copenhaver 2018b; 2002b is the published version of my talk at I Tatti; other sketches of parts of my story—­now completely rethought and rewritten with new documentation—­may be found in Copenhaver 1999, 2002a, 2007a, 2007b, 2011, 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b, 2018a, 2018b, 2019. 7. Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012.

1. Vile Bodies and Naked Dignity “The Ordre for the Buriall of the Dead” from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. 1. B, sig. YYviiiv; Poliziano, Miscellanies, pr. 22 (Dyke / Cottrell); Prop. 2.34.65; Isid. Etym. 12.7.22: Gianfrancesco Pico cited the preface to Poliziano’s ­ ncle for the first edition (1496) of the Miscellanea in testimonia to his u collected works. 2. Pico’s Oration is in Phoenix Books Number 1, Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall 1948. Lindsay W ­ aters of Harvard University Press and Randolph Petilos from Chicago have checked the rec­ords, which show more than 25,000 paperback copies sold since 1956, when the book first appeared in that format, ­after 1,500 cloth copies had been contracted for the first printing in 1948. Paperback publication was not yet common for academic books, and many students ­will have used hardbound library copies: see https://­w ww​ .­publishinghistory​.­com​/­phoenix​-­books​-­university​-­of​-­chicago​-­press​.­html. 533

534

Notes to Pages 10–17

3. Suda, Π 1500; Harris 1916; Halliday 1922; Harrison 1963, 94–111; Wood and Agnew 2004; Frazer 2015, 3:6–15, 88–92: Rendel Harris, a devout Quaker, was a New Testament scholar who curated manuscripts for the John Rylands Library a­ fter 1918. In 1913 he published Boanerges, his investigation of the “sons of thunder” in Matt. 3:17; in 1916 he followed up with a pamphlet on Picus Who Is Also Zeus. Jane Harrison promoted his theory about woodpeckers and sacred twins—­like Faunus and Picus in the Aeneid or John and James in the Gospel—­which ­others attacked as “bold speculation,” though J. G. Frazer, who filled his Golden Bough with analogies, disagreed less strenuously. 4. Verg. Aen. 1.6; 7.45–49, 170–191. 5. Ov. Met. 14.308–434, esp. 389–392. 6. Ov. Fast. 3.37–57, 285–360. 7. B, sigs. ar, av v, alluding to the Attic Nights by Aulus Gellius and the Saturnalia of Macrobius: see Gell. NA, pr. 1–2; cf. Macrob. Sat. pr. 1–10, preferring “short paths to long and winding roads” while also claiming to be orderly. 8. Bratti and Papazzoni 1872, 11–16; also Anon. 1874, 17, 138, in a ­later and anonymous Storia bellissima della nobilissima casa Picca that takes the story up to 1692 but deals only with the Pico f­ amily; dates and names from the chronicles, as given ­here, are not always accurate. 9. Bratti and Papazzoni 1872, 15–16. 10. Ibid., 16–18. 11. Ibid., 18–22. 12. Ibid., 3–6, 92, 127–134; for the dates, see Andreolli 2015. 13. Bratti and Papazzoni 1872, 94, 98–99, 108, 114–115. 14. Ibid., 98, 116–117, 124, 130; the list of books in a ­later Chronicle, Anon. 1874, 46, is shorter and also lacks the Conclusions and Oration. 15. Bratti and Papazzoni 1872, 117, with notes 86 and 92 at 152, 154–155; Ceretti 1907–1913, 20:111–122; Quaquarelli and Zanardi 2005, 101–240; Anon. 1874, 46, with n. 116 on p. 169. 16. B, sig. av v; Bratti and Papazzoni 1872, 130; Quaquarelli and Zanardi 2005, 413–414. 17. Bratti and Papazzoni 1872, 108–116. 18. Apol.; Hept.; For Pico’s biography and chronology in a recent summary, see Bacchelli 2015; Papazzoni also failed to mention Pico’s bungled abduction of a married ­woman, a scandal suppressed in Gianfrancesco’s Life as well; cf. Anon. 1874, 45–46, which describes the event in some detail but shifts the blame to the young w ­ oman. 19. B, sig. av v; Deitz 2005, reviewing Farmer 1998, concludes that this En­glish version of the Conclusions “raises a number of serious interpretative and conceptual prob­lems” and therefore has “­limited usefulness”; Pico 1995b,



Notes to Pages 17–23

535

2006, and 2017 are Italian, French, and German translations. For traces of the Oration in papal sermons, see O’Malley 1974 and 1979, 53–55, 111–112, 132–137; also Dougherty 2008b, 146–151. 20. Quaquarelli and Zanardi 2005, 335–410, lists 763 items; see also Quaquarelli and Dougherty 2007; cf. Copenhaver 2016a. 21. Schedel 1493, fols. c c x xv iii r , c c xxx v, c c x l iii, c c l r , c c l iiii –­c c l v, c c l vi i–­c c l xi v. 22. Ibid., fol. c c l x iiii r ; Wilson and Wilson 1976, 20–29, 43–49, 181–191, 195–205; and for the prior situation, Morris 1972; Le Goff 1993; Gurevich 1995; Verger 2000; Fenster and Small 2003; also Benedict 2007, 87–89 for news-­sheets available to Schedel and printed closer to the time of the events. 23. Schedel 1493, fols. c cx xv ii v –­c c l vi v. 24. Ibid., fols. c c lv i v, c c lv ii v ; Vit. sig. ax v. 25. Schedel 1493, fols. c cx xv ii v –­c c l vi i v, esp. c c lv i v, c c lv ii v ; Trithemius 1494, fols. 128r, 139 v–140r; Roeck 1998, 187–189. Book-­chat traveled fast enough in both directions for Gianfrancesco Pico to include the entry by Trithemius with testimonia to his ­uncle in the first collected edition of his works: B, sig. YYviiiv. The only other edition of Pico’s Conclusions ­a fter the princeps and before 1532 was prob­ably printed in Ingolstadt, north of Munich, in 1487: see ISTC ip00639300. 26. Foresti 1503, fol. 436r; Megli Fratini 1997; Pico did not w ­ ill his books to San Marco: see Anon. 1874, 46, 169; also Chapters 5–10 of this book. 27. Foresti 1503, fols. 413r, 436r; Wilson and Wilson 1976, 20–21; Megli Fratini 1997; for Gianfrancesco’s Life of Giovanni and edition of his works, see Chapter 5.2 of this book; also Chapter 3.3 for the blood libel. 28. Wilson and Wilson 1976, 20–29. 29. Copenhaver 2018b. 30. Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall 1948; Kagan, Ozment, and Turner 1979, 342–343; 1983, 372; 1995, 364–365. 31. For the vocabulary of praise, Spielvogel 1999, 266–268; also E. Weber 1959, 263; Brinton, Christopher, and Wolff 1960, 448; Muller 1963, 123; Hexter 1967, 302–315; Elton 1968, 51–52; M. Chambers et al. 1974, 394; Willis 1977, 518–519; McKay, Hill, and Buckler 1983, 427; Mickelson-­ Gaughan 1991, 78–81; Cannistaro and Reich 1999, 405, 429; King 2000, 409–410; Rogers 2000, 383–384. Websites (see goodreads​.­com) used by college and high school students now attribute words from the McKay textbook—­“that ­t here are no limits” to ­human capability—to the Oration itself. Writing in Italy from a Catholic perspective before many of ­t hese books w ­ ere published, Pignagnoli 1964b, 259–261, regretted the “encomiastic rhe­toric” about Pico—­“ facile and improvised enthusiasms” that ­were

536

Notes to Pages 23–32

“vacuous and reductive” and a “sad fate for someone who had excited stunned amazement in an Erasmus.” 32. Schedel 1493, fols. c c xxx v, c c l iiii v, c c lv ii v, c c l x iiii r , c c l x xii v ; Wilson and Wilson 1976, 46, 136, 155, 198–205. 33. App. A.18; Ba, 32–34 (80); Asclep. 11–12; Chapter 5 of this book. 34. Manetti 1975 1:34; 2:38–39; 3:9; 4:20, 25, 36. 35. Drama and ­music are not lifeless, of course, unlike paper scores and scripts—­ apart from per­for­mance; Kant, CJ, 277; GMM, 68–69; Copenhaver 2017a. 36. Kant, GMM, 68–69. 37. Kant, MM, 569–570: using the Latin words, Kant’s phrase is “eine unverlierbäre Würde (dignitas interna).” 38. Ibid., 569–570. 39. Kant, CJ, 277. 40. For Tennemann and Brucker, see Chapters 6.1 and 8.1–2 of this book; also Bn, xi, xv–­x vi; Copenhaver 2002b. 41. Copenhaver 2016a; Chapters 11.1 and 13.1–2 of this book. 42. App. A.7; Ba, 12 (24); Kristeller 1965, 53. 43. App. A.11, 15–19, 24, 29; Ba, 22–42, 52–54 (47–95, 113). 44. App. A.11, 27; Ba, 2–4 (3–6), 22 (50), 48 (103), with Bn, xi, xv–­x vi; Garin 1938, where only one of the texts cited—­Manetti’s book—­says anything about dignitas; the first printed text to attach the word to the speech as a title was Pico 1504, sigs. Ar, LXXXIVv, LXXXXv; cf. Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 40–41. 45. Scheller 1788, s.vv.; Freund 1845, s.vv.; Chapter 8.1–2 of this book. 46. Burckhardt 1989, esp. 352; Pater 1980, 30–32; Craven 1981, 45; Cappelli 2006, 21; Sensen 2011, 79–80; Kateb 2011, 3–4; Rosen 2012, 14–24; Waldron 2012, 6–7, 86; Steenbekkers 2014, 89–92; Chapters 2 and 9.1 of this book. 47. Pater 1980, 23–38, 57–60. 48. Ibid., 35; Kant, MM, 202. 49. Schopenhauer, Welt 1.66–67: the UN posts the “Declaration” on its website, along with a page for the nine “draf­ters,” at http://­w ww​.­un​.­org​/­en​ /­documents​/­udhr​/­drafters​.­shtml. 50. Kristeller 1985a; Foà 2007; Viti 1994a: ­because dignitas is not always “dignity,” I often use the Latin word instead of the En­glish; Manetti’s Latin title is De dignitate et excellentia hominis. 51. Manetti 1975, pr. 2; Facio 1611; Foà 2007; Viti 1994a; the two volumes of Trinkaus 1970 aim to cover the universe of writings about dignitas from this period. 52. Petrarch 2002, 1.948–959; Lugano 1901, xxvii–­x xxii; Trinkaus 1970, 1:173–321; Kristeller 1985a, 531–532; Antonio’s Latin title is De dignitate hominis et de excellentia humanae vitae.



Notes to Pages 33–39

537

53. App. A.11, 27; Ba, 22, 48 (50, 103); Manetti 1975, pr. 1; 1:1 (tit.), 25, 34, 43–45, 52–53; 2:8, 16, 18, 20, 23, 30, 46; 3:11, 13, 22, 37–38, 41, 45, 49–50, 56–57, 59; 4:1, 18, 25, 28, 62, 71, 73–74: this list includes dignus as well as dignitas, which occurs 23 times. 54. Manetti 1975, pr. 2; Copenhaver 2018b. 55. A. Wood 1999, xiv. 56. Manetti 1975, pr. 1: amor ac benevolentia (love and friendship); inductus et quasi compulsus (persuaded and almost compelled); affatim abundeque (bountifully and abundantly); dignissima et admirabili (most worthy and admirable); diligenter et accurate (attentively and carefully); late copioseque (at length and in detail); certa ac vera (certain and true); singulares ac vere admirabiles et paene divinas (matchless, truly admirable and nearly divine); animum mentemque (spirit and mind). The first few cases of plane et aperte are at 1:44, 54; 2:10, 12, 15—­and then on and on, sometimes with clare et aperte as a variant. The animus / anima question comes up at 2:3. 57. Radin 1923; Grant 1943; Balsdon 1960; Wirszubski 1954; 1968, 15–17; Pöschl 1989; Atkins 2000, esp. 481–483; Schofield 2012; I have relied especially on Wirszubski’s 1954 article. A search of the Packard Humanities Institute’s database of classical Latin texts shows 1,853 occurences of dignitas—1,008 (54 ­percent) in Cicero’s writings. 58. Cic. Sest. 1. 59. Cic. Sest. 96–99; Wirszubski 1954, 3–6. 60. Cic. Sest. 52; Dom. 9, 57; Fam. 1.9.24; De or. 2.334, 345–347: Quint. Inst. 12.2. 61. Cic. De or. 1.142–43; 2.346–347. 62. Cic. De or. 3.176–180. 63. Cic. De or. 3.180; Off. 1.107, 126, 130, 138–139, ­etc. 64. Cic. Off. 93; Dyck 1996, 2–8, 17, 38, 238–249. 65. Dyck 1996, 252; Ernout and Meillet 2001, s.v. decet. 66. Cic. Off. 1.99–100, 105–106. 67. Pöschl 1989, 38–39. 68. In the NT Vulg., see 1Tim. 6:10 for ‘avarice’ (cupiditas); Eph. 5:4 for ‘buffoonery’ (scurrilitas); Mark 4:39 ‘calm’ (tranquillitas); Rom. 1:20 ‘divinity’ (divinitas); 2Cor. 8:14 ‘equality’ (aequalitas); 2Cor. 4:7 ‘excellence’ (sublimitas); Gal. 5:22 ‘forbearance’ (longanimitas); Luke 2:9 ‘glory’ (claritas); Rom. 2:4 ‘goodness’ (benignitas); John 11:4 ‘illness’ (infirmitas); Matt. 24:12 ‘iniquity’ (iniquitas); Rom. 3:3 ‘unbelief’ (incredulitas); Rom. 3:16 ‘unhappiness’ (infelicitas); Rom. 3:1 ‘usefulness’ (utilitas). OT Vulg. passages with dignitas are Esth. 9:3, 10:2; Ezek. 24:25; Prov. 14:28, 16:31, 20:29; Eccles. 10:6; Ecclus. 44:3, 45:30; Bar. 4:3; 1Mac. 10:24, 55; 3Ezra 8:3. 69. Gen. 1:26; Dicta Albini de imagine Dei, in Marenbon 2006, 33, 43, 158–161: Marenbon explains that Albinus (Whitey) was Alcuin’s nickname.

538

Notes to Pages 40–50

70. Aug. Trin. 10.10–12.15; 1Thess. 5:23 (Lattimore trans.). 71. Philipp. 3:21 and the Book of Common Prayer, as in the epigram of this chapter. 72. Marenbon 2006, 33–36, 144–151; MPL 10:865A. 73. Leo’s sermons are translated in Leo I 2012; I have followed the Latin text in MPL 54; Maxwell-­Stuart 1997, 36–37. 74. Leo, Serm. 3.4; 4.1–2, 4; 5.1, 4; 83.1. 75. Leo, Serm. 31.3; 32.2; 38.2; 48.1; 56.5; 57.2; 59.4; 64.1; 76.2; 82.5; 85.2; 105.7, 9. 76. Leo, Serm. 12.1; 25.5; 29.2; 32.3; 59.4, 7; 57.2; 62.2; 76.2. 77. Leo, Serm. 21.3; 24.2; 26.3; 27.6; 39.2; 42.2; 46.2; 71.2; 72.2; 104.2. 78. Leo, Serm. 22.2; 51.2–3; 64.2; 83.4; Tert. De carne Christi, 5.4. 79. Aug. Trin. 10.10–12.15; 1Thess. 5:23 (Lattimore trans.). 80. Ps.-­Anselm, Liber meditationum et orationum, MPL 158:709–722A. 81. Gen. 1:31; Euch. Epist. de contemptu mundi, MPL 50:711–726, esp. 716A–­B; Bultot 1964, 2:133–141. 82. Matt. 13:12; Luke 14:11; Philipp. 2:7; Bultot 1961. 83. Lotario dei Segni 1978, 2–5, 93; Maxwell-­Stuart 1997, 103–107. 84. Lotario dei Segni 1978, 105, 113, 179, 183, 191,195. 85. Ibid., 93–97, 125, 129, citing Job 10:9, 30:19. 86. Ibid., 205, citing Job 17:14. 87. Petrarch 2002, 1.948–959; 2005, 641 (16.9); Trinkaus 1970, 1:179–182. 88. Kristeller 1985a; Facio 1611. 89. Manetti 1975, 4:18–19, 44–45. 90. Manetti 1975; Copenhaver 2018a; cf. Gentile 1916 and its ­later editions, discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 of this book. 91. Manetti 1975, esp. pr. 1; 1:1 (tit.), 25, 34, 43–45, 52–53; 2:8, 16, 18, 20, 23, 30, 46; 3:11, 13, 22, 37–38, 41, 45, 49–50, 56–57, 59; 4:1, 18, 25, 28, 62, 71, 73–74. 92. Ibid., 1:1, 40, 48–49; 2:3, 11, 14, 16, 18, 26, 38; 3:15, 28, 38–39, 42; 4:5, 23, 40, 46–48, 69–70. 93. Ibid., 2:13, 15, 17; 3:6, 7, 35. 94. Ibid., 3:54; Peter Lombard, Sent. 2.1.4.1; 4.24.1–3, 13–15. 95. Palmieri 1982, 3:136–137; Hankins 2014, 103. 96. Manetti 1975, 1:3–11, 14–32, esp. 25; Cic. Nat. d. 2.133–150; Lact. Opif. Dei, 8.1–13.9, esp. 10.26; Cicero 2010, 2.xiii–­x vi; Perrin 1981, 55–204. 97. For dignus and its pairings, Manetti 1975, 1: pr.1–2, 34, 43–45, 52; 2:8, 23, 30, 38–39; 3:11, 13, 22, 41, 45, 49–50, 56, 59; 4:18, 20, 25, 28, 36; the words paired with dignitas or dignus are ‘broad’ (latus), ‘distinguished’ (praecipuus), ‘exalted’ (exaltatus), ‘genuine’ (verus), ‘handsome’ (amplus), ‘im­mense’ (immensus), ‘incredible’ (incredibilis), ‘lordly’ (dominans), ‘mighty’ (potens), ‘noble’ (nobilis), ‘ranked’ (gradatus), ‘suitable’ (accomodatus), and ‘unique’ (unicus): to simplify, vari­ous forms of ­t hese words have been converted to adjectives.



Notes to Pages 50–59

539

98. Kant, IUH, 40–41; Debes 2017, 14, for qualifications of Kant’s role in the modern story of dignity. 99. Pagden 1986; Marenbon 2015; Copenhaver and Schmitt 1992, 112–116; Pharo 2014. 100. Manetti 1975, 2:37–40; 4:4, 18–22; Chapter 1.7 of this book. 101. Manetti 1975, 4:18–24. 102. Lotario dei Segni 1978, 99; Manetti 1975, 4:53. 103. Job 1:21; Lotario dei Segni 1978, 105; Manetti 1975, 4:49–50. 104. Gen. 9:21; 2Sam. 11:2–5; Dan. Sus. 1:5–27; Matt. 3:16; John 19:23; Clark 1956, 231–243; Leppert 2007, 167–180; Lindquist 2012. 105. Clark 1956, 51–69, 230–32; Langdale 2002; Leppert 2007, 161–166, 180–188, 192–215; Foà 2007. 106. Manetti 1975, 2:36–40. 107. Ibid., 2:40; Val. Max. 8.11, ext. 4; Plin. Nat. 36.21. 108. Pope-­Hennesy 1993, 38–46, 147–156. 109. Kren 2018, 26–27. 110. Manetti 1975, 4:57–60, 65. 111. Pater 1980, 23–38, 57–60. 112. For Manetti’s achievement, see Gentile 1916; also Garin 1938; Trinkaus 1970, 1:230–258; Dröge 1987; Manetti 1990; Glaap 1994; Schmeisser 2006; Baldassarri 2008. 113. Ephes. 3:18; [Long.] Subl. 2.1; Doran 2015, 50; https://­en​.­w ikipedia​.­org​/­w iki​ /­Bathos. 114. Kimmelman 2012. 115. Gopnik 2015. 116. Cic. De or. 3.180; Off. 1.107, 126, 130, 138–139, ­etc.; http://­w ww​.­un​.­org​/­en​ /­documents​/­udhr​/­drafters​.­shtml; Chapter 1.3 of this book. 117. Waugh 1948; Mitford 1998, 78–79. 118. Mitford 1998, 79. 119. Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall 1948; Kagan, Ozment, and Turner 1979, 342–343; 1983, 372; 1995, 364–365; Chapter 1.2 of this book. 120. https://­en​.­w ikipedia​.­org​/­w iki​/­Giovanni​_­Pico​_­della​_ ­Mirandola; Kerrigan and Braden 1989, 117–133. 121. Kerrigan and Braden 1989, 151. 122. Lemprière 1984, vii–­x, 106, 111–113. 123. Racine, Brittanicus, 2.3. 124. Skinner 1984a, 12, 145, 196, 214–215, 223, 256; 1984c, 227. The Greek stuck with him: in 1983, when explaining why he turned down a job in California in the early 1960s, he wrote, “I have always feared lotus-­blossoms. I am not a λωτοϕάγος.”

540

Notes to Pages 59–71

125. Skinner 1984a, 223–226, 264–265, 291–292; 1984b, 295–297, 330, 340; 1984c, 3; 2005, 1. 126. As of March 18, 2018, the Amazon “best-­sellers rank” was 50,428, beating ἀ e Loved One at 417,285. 127. Ledoux 2012, 60; Skinner 2012; as of March 18, 2018, the Amazon rank for Beyond Freedom and Dignity was 214,973. 128. Skinner 2005, 293–296; http://­content​.­time​.­com​/­time​/­covers. Commencement speeches preoccupied Skinner: see 1984c, 126–127, 191–193, 353, for comments on talks by Nathan Pusey at Harvard in the 1960s and 1970s. 129. Skinner 1973, 11, 19. 130. Asclep. 6; Ba, 2 (2); Skinner 1973, 10, 21. 131. Skinner 1973, 25. 132. Ibid., 30. 133. Ibid., 31–47, esp. 31–32. 134. Ibid., 32–37, 41, 44–46, 57, 81–82, 98, 120, 124, 162, 168, 193. 135. Ibid., 34–35. 136. Ibid., 41–45. 137. Ibid., 45–46. 138. Ibid., 48–62. 139. Ibid., 56–57. 140. Ibid., 58–62. 141. Ibid., 100, 124, 180, 196. 142. Skinner 1984c, 311–368, esp. 342–343; http://­americanhumanist​.­org​ /­Humanism​/­Humanist​_ ­Manifesto​_­III, where the 1931 and 1973 manifestos are posted. While Skinner was attacking dignity, Peter Berger, a con­ temporary, linked it with freedom and individuality, contrasted it with honor in a social and institutional setting, and concluded that ­f uture institutions must support “discoveries of h ­ uman dignity that are the principal achievements of modern man”: see Berger 1970. 143. Chapter 1.2, 1.9, and Chapter 4 of this book. 144. Pinker 2008, 2011; Waldron 2012: for “the escalator of reason,” see Singer 2011, 88–89, 113–114; also Chapter 1.3 of this book for current and previous treatments of dignity.

2. Pico Dignified Burckhardt 1860, 354: this is the first edition; 1989 is a recent critical text; and 1990 is the standard En­glish version, first published in 1878. Kaegi 1947–1982 is a monumental life of Burckhardt. 1. Burckhardt 1860, 196–197.



Notes to Pages 71–80

541

2. Ibid.; Michelet 1855, 10. Voltaire and o ­ thers had already used the French word in narrower applications: see Voltaire 1769, 1:86; Febvre 1992, 36–41, 156–165, 174–179, 227–230; Stierle 1995. 3. Burckhardt 1860, 98, 100, 138, 269; Voigt 1859, 4, 14, 49, 106, 149–152; cf. Voigt 1880; Sabbadini 1905, 203; Sabbadini 1996 is a reprint; also Garin 1996; Grendler 2006b. When Voigt wrote that Petrarch “set the tone for ­earlier and l­ ater schools of Humanismus,” he was describing a movement, but the Humanismus that he saw in the poet’s soul was an attitude, the “­free power that wants to create every­t hing out of its own heart.” But according to Burckhardt, humanism declined from pragmatic expediency to amoral sophistry. Its versatile individualism was productive at first b ­ ecause “philological learning was not, as it is t­ oday, simply an objective mastery of the classical period: in use it had to serve the needs of everyday life.” ­Later, when printing broke the humanist mono­poly on the classics, a larger public could see how the “perverse influence of antiquity disrupted their morality without giving them its own.” Voigt was aware of the related prob­lem of empty imitation, Nachamung. For more recent debates about humanism, see Chapter 4.4 of this book. 4. Balbo 1836, 253, 263–269, 299–307, 340, 347–349; Burckhardt 1876; Bullen 1994, 22; Caldari Bevilacqua 1995, 71–72; Jachia 1996, 69–78, 92–94; De Sanctis 2002, 1:425–516; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 47, 66–67, 168, 369; Rubini 2014, 30–84. 5. Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012; on post-­Kantian and Hegelian histories of philosophy, including Tennemann’s, see Chapters 1.3 and 8 of this book. 6. Burckhardt 1860, 1, 196–197, 214, 354–355, 478, 522–523, 554, 560; Röthlin 1986–1987; Kelly 1996; Gossman 2000, 249–295, 308–314; Hinde 2000, 167– 198, 226–231; Grendler 2006b, 317. 7. Burckhardt 1860, 1–170, esp. 2–3, 139; Hegel 1986d, 305–306; 1986c, 299, 403; Hinde 2000, 160–165; cf. Gombrich 1979, 34–42. 8. Burckhardt 1860, 131–132; Norbrook 1988–1989; cf. Nauert 1995, 66–68. 9. Burckhardt 1860, 171–279; Grendler 2006b, 320. 10. Burckhardt 1860, 280–354; Michelet 1855, 10; Voltaire 1769, 1:86; Febvre 1992, 36–41, 156–165, 174–179, 227–230; Stierle 1995. 11. Burckhardt 1860, 355–426. 12. Ibid., 427–564, esp. 430. 13. Ibid., 428–456. 14. Ibid., 465–482. 15. Ibid., 494–495, 512–550, esp. 522–523, 540. 16. Ibid., 522, 531, 535, 540–541, 554–555. 17. Ibid., 560–561. 18. Ibid., 74, 88, 198–204, 209–216, 280–292, 379–383, 453–455, 494–497.

542

Notes to Pages 81–93

19. Ibid., 2, 8, 22–24, 49–50, 97–102, 134, 150–154, 161–170, 228, 303–305, 327, 333, 355–359, 364–365, 376–379, 385, 430, 545–547, esp. 333. 20. Ibid., 3–6, 14–15, 44–45, 60–61, 69–72, 285, 341–342, 365–384. 21. Ibid., 37–43, 86–103. 22. Ibid., 33–34, 213, 529–530. 23. Ibid., 196, 214, 354, 478, 522, 554, 560; the note on p. 496 refers to an e­ arlier mention of Pico on p. 354. 24. Ibid., 196–197, quoting from Pico’s letter to Barbaro on philosophical language: B, sig. SSr; Gossman 2000, 301–302. 25. Burckhardt 1860, 173–194, 213–215, 244–245. 26. Ibid., 270–271, 327–338. 27. Ibid., 303, 347–354, esp. 352–354; Kelly 1996, 112, concluding that “high culture” was Burckhardt’s focus, recognizes that he did not ignore “popu­lar culture.” 28. App. A.5–7; Ba, 10–12 (18–30); Burckhardt 1860, 354. 29. Burckhardt 1860, 353–355, 400–401. 30. B, sig. ax; Burckhardt 1860, 478. 31. Burckhardt 1860, 495–497. 32. Ibid., 512–550, esp. 522–523; for Aby Warburg’s similar reaction to learned superstition, see Copenhaver 2015a, 44–51, 231–271. 33. Burckhardt 1860, 512, 550, 553–561, esp. 522–523, 560–561. 34. Ibid., 350, 354. 35. Gentile 1916, esp. 17, 37, 44–45, for Gentile’s awareness of Burckhardt; Gentile 2001; also Burckhardt 1989, 352; http://­w ww​.­t reccani​.­it​ /­enciclopedia​/­. 36. Garin 1937; Cassese 1971; http://­w ww​.­insr​.­it; Gentile and Garin are the main subjects of Chapters 3 and 4 of this book.

3. Pico Resurgent Garin 1937, 224. 1. Anon. 1913; for an Italian text of Un uomo finito, see Papini 1977, 131–385; ἀ e Failure is the title of Papini 1924, the authorized En­glish version. See also Adamson 1993, 153–172; Ridolfi 1996; Castaldini 2006; Averto 2014. 2. The version of “The Essence of the Re­nais­sance” in Papini 1942, 21–30, is a reprint of Papini 1940. 3. Papini 1977, 146–147, 213–220, 232; Cini 2013 is a recent newspaper report on the exhumation and its sequel. The 2008 disentombment may have been the third. According to a study reported by Roush 2015, 132–133, 212–213, Pico was originally buried outside the church, ­until his friend, Girolamo Benivieni, bought a tomb inside for both of them.



Notes to Pages 94–102

543

4. Papini 1921, 44, 447, 458, 508, 527, 542; 1934, 1940, 1942; Adamson 1993, 52–102, 139–143, 257–262; De Felice 2001, 111–118, 509; Baum 2011; also section 9 of this chapter. The INSR, founded as a National Center on July 29, 1937, became an Institute in August of 1942: http://­w ww​.­insr​.­it. 5. Quaquarelli and Zanardi 2005, 317–410. 6. Berti 1859, 1868, 1886; Fiorentino 1872–1874, 2.[2–3]; Nitti 1967; Malusa 1977, 144–145. For the books in German, see Chapter 8.2 of this book, also Sigwart 1855 and Dreydorff 1858. 7. Berti 1859, 19–23, 28–31; Ceretti 1872, vii; Nitti 1967. 8. Oreglia 1883, 34.12.3: 736–737; Anon. 1895; Cotta 1874, 512–513; Katz 1970, 148–159; Dante 1990, 11–97; 2004, 7–31; Taradel and Raggi 2000, 3–92, 98–101; Sale 2001, 21–80; Conti 2003, 17–107; Kertzer 2004; Copenhaver 2018a. 9. Kertzer 1998; Florence 2006. 10. Drach 1825, 1844, 1864; Franck 1843; Katz 1970, 224–246; Ferrari 1983, 22–32, 41–43; Klein 1991, 182–183; Febvre 1992, 64–71; Copleston 2003, 42–47. 11. Oreglia 1883, 34.12.1: 608–611; 2:485; Neofitus 1883; Singer and Mannheimer 1906; Handler 1980, 38–49, 92–103, 150–151, 168–172, 229–230; Klein 1991, 190–191. 12. Oreglia 1883, 34.12.3: 738–741. 13. Ibid., 34.12.1: 606–613, 727–730. 14. Ibid., 34.12.1: 730–731; 2: 225–227, 232, 364, 484, 611, 621; 3:736–738; on good and bad Kabbalah, see Apol. 48–49, 59; Sisto da Siena 1593, 63; Budde 1702a; Brucker 1742–1744, 4.1.59–61, 369–370, 439–446, 703–705; also Bottin and Longo 2011, 356; Chapter 6.2 of this book. 15. Oreglia 1883, 34.12.2: 484–485. 16. Ibid., 34.12.2: 729; 12.3: 476–479, 597–598. 17. Ibid., 1883, 34.12:3: 736–737. 18. Schedel 1493, fols. c c l iiii v, ccc v ; Hsia 1992, 26–33, 48–49, 67–68, 87–89, 102–104. 19. Hsia 1992, 51–60; https://­sansimoninotrento​.­wordpress​.­com​/­chi​-­siamo​/­. 20. Schedel 1493, fols. c c xxx v, c c l iiii v ; Hsia 1992, 92–93; Wilson and Wilson 1976, 46. 21. Schedel 1493, fols. c c x xv iii r , c c xxx v, c c x l i v, c c x l iii, c x l v i r , c c l r , c c l ii v, c cl x ii v, ccc r ; Foresti of Bergamo 1503, fols. 413r, 436r; Chapter 1.2 of this book. 22. Oreglia 1883, 34.12.1: 608–611; Anon. 1882, esp. 473. Only the columns from 1883 on Pico w ­ ere identified as Oreglia’s when they ­were published ­later as Oreglia 1894, but the 1882 material on Trent is clearly by the same author; see also Calzolari et al. 1998, 86; http://­w ww​.­comune​.­mirandola​ .­mo​.­it​/­.

544

Notes to Pages 102–108

23. Oreglia 1894. 24. Anon. 1872–­, 1874; Calori Cesis 1897; Ceretti 1872, 1879, 1890, 1893, 1895a, 1895b, 1907–1913; Molinari 1897; Calzolari et al. 1998, 9–19, 85–86, 95–97, 103–104, 112–118; Chapter 1.1 of this book. 25. Molinari 1897; Dorez and Thuasne 1997; Calzolari et al. 1998, 81, 90, 104–105. 26. Ceretti 1907–1913, 18:94–97, 104–108; Calori Cesis 1897, 84; Malavisi 1897; Calzolari et al. 1998, 101, 105–106, 114–119. 27. Di Giovanni 1894, xi, 2, 4, 18–22, 101, 120, 135, 168–170, 175–176, 196, 209; Ceretti 1907–1913, 18:97–98. 28. Di Giovanni 1894, ix–­x, 9, 45–53, 61, 64, 66, 70–71, 81–82, 90, 96, 101, 136, 168, 187–188. 29. Di Giovanni 1899; Massetani 1897, 30–36, 74–75, 87, 90, 96. 30. Massetani 1897, 9–11, 15, 18–19, 28, 36, 40–45, 61, 66–70, 76–79, 85–86, 90, 92–95, 99, 104, 108–109, 112–113, 121–122, 148, 165–169. 31. Ibid., 153–163; Franck 1843; App. A.1. 32. Bratti and Papazzoni 1872, 117, where De oratione is a commentary on the Lord’s prayer, not the celebrated Oration; Ceretti 1907–1913, 20.111–122; Gentile 1999a, 69; Garin 1989a, 76: “When I turned to studying Pico, the lit­er­a­ture on him was not rich in Italy or elsewhere, and it was not easy to find one’s way through the sources, especially the Kabbalah.” See also the assessment of Oreglia and Massetani in Di Napoli 1965, 292–294. 33. Gentile 1916, 38, n. 1; cf. 1940, 75; 1999b; Massetani 1897, 165–169. 34. Gentile 1999c; Semprini 1921, 1936. 35. Semprini 1921, 93–111, 125, 189–190, 234–235; App. A.64; Ba, 118–120 (235–238), describing Kabbalah as “a true and more secret reading of the Law,” about which “it was a m ­ atter of divine command, not ­human judgment, to keep secret from the populace what should be told to the perfect”; see Chapters 11.1 and 13.2 of this book. 36. Semprini 1921, 71–74; Gentile 1999c, 963–965, cites Dreydorff , discussed in Chapter 8.2 of this book, and Gentile 1920, 112–178, which expands Gentile 1916. 37. Gentile 1916, 37–40, 44, 48; 1920, 140; 1925, 58–61; 1940, 70, 75; Garin 1938, 102. 38. Gentile 1999c, 964; Anagnine 1937; and section 8 of this chapter; see Bassi 2013, 64, on Garin’s view of Gentile at this time. 39. Gentile 1999b, 69; Semprini 1921; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012; on post-­Kantian and Hegelian histories of philosophy, see Chapter 8 of this book. 40. Malusa 1977, 52–54; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 48–52, 343–370, esp. 349, 351–352. 41. Spaventa 2003, 55–56.



Notes to Pages 108–118

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42. Gentile 1916, 17, 37, 44–45; 2001; Burckhardt 1989, 352; Spaventa 1972a. 43. Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 90–162; Sebastiano Gentile 2015. 44. Garin 2000, 9; Audisio and Savorelli 2003; Copenhaver 2005; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 118–130; Ciliberto 2011a; Catanorchi and Lepri 2011; Bassi 2013, 70. 45. Semprini 1936; Anagnine 1937; Baum 2011, 248. 46. Garin 1937, 139, 145–153, 167; 1942a, 59–65, 428–499, esp. 61 and 446–469; 1947b, 370–371; Chapters 11.1–3 and 13.2 of this book. 47. Gentile 1916, 68; Bacon, Novum organum 1.68; Garin 1942a, 62–63; also 1938, 102, 146: “No one can miss the tones of novelty, the streaks of genuine originality that characterize the cele­bration of the dignity of man in thinkers of the Quattrocento, . . . ​and pages written twenty years ago by Giovanni Gentile on the concept of man in the Re­nais­sance retain their full value ­today. . . . ​In the lit­er­a­ture of the Re­nais­sance, . . . ​dignitas was located in the creation of a regnum hominis.” For my reading of the Oration, see Chapters 11, 12, and 13 of this book. 48. Garin 1937, 224; 1989a, 78. 49. Gentile 1916, 17–20, 34–36, 43, 51–52, 68. 50. Ibid., 37–39, also 20, where Campanella’s “sensualism is straightforward idealism.” 51. Hegel 1986c, 23; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 126–141. 52. Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 131–146, 695–712. 53. Anagnine 1937; Saitta 1937–1938; Gentile 1940, 75; Cassirer 1942, 128–130, 140. 54. Garin 1997a, 532–540; 1995a, 649; De Ruggiero 1918–1947; Bobbio 1955; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 3–6. 55. Anagnine 1934, 1935; Garin 1937, 1, 236–237. 56. Saitta 1937–1938, 250–251; Anagnine 1951, 1958, 1964; Tamborra 1977, 159– 165, 172–173, 249–250; Scandura 1995, 352. 57. Anagnine 1937: the date on the back of the title page is “February, 1937,” and—in my copy—­t he Prefecture’s stamp is on the front of the previous page, with dates of delivery and receipt of February 6 and 13; see also Garin 1937; Vittoria 2004; Turi 2006, 477–487. 58. Anagnine 1937, vi, [279]. 59. Ibid., 4–6, 9, 22–23, 26, 32–33, 35, 37, 47, 53, 60, 65, 67–70, 72. 60. Ibid., 75–202, esp. 77, 80–81, 83, 96–98; Wirszubski 1989; Garin 1937, 89–105, 137–154; 1989a, 68, 75–75, 81–82, where Garin wrote that Jacob Teicher introduced him to Scholem’s work in the late 1930s, presumably a­ fter the Pico book was finished in 1934, ­a fter being started in 1931. 61. App. A.3.1K44; Concl., 27; Anagnine 1937, 130–140, esp. 131, 135, also 248–250; Saitta 1937–1938, 250.

546

Notes to Pages 119–125

62. Fabre 1998, 50–51, 66–69; Bonsaver 2007, 172. 63. Garin 1937, 89–105, 137–154; Scholem 1973, first published in Hebrew in 1957. 64. Saitta 1923; 1949–1950, 1.ii; Novarese 2011, 385–388; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 142–146, 706–712. 65. App. A.62; Saitta 1949–1950, 1:577–622, never citing Anagnine, mentioned Garin’s works and editions by name seven times and wrote that his 1937 book “seems to me for now the best work on Pico which has appeared” (591). 66. Anagnine 1939a, 1939b; Garin 1994a, xiii, xvi, xxii, xxvii. 67. Pico 1905; Semprini 1936, 221, speaking of his translation: “I thought I might put all of it into Italian, and this is the first time it has been translated”; Cicognani in Pico 1943, iv–vi, xi, xv, 102–107, 110–111, 124–132, dates his translation—­not yet published—to 1925, noting that “the ­whole Oration was translated for the first time by Liebert, into German”; Marrucchi 1938; Garin 1989a, 81, mentions Cicognani’s version, but not Semprini’s, as preceding his own; see also Cicognani 1938; Petroni 1981; Garin 1997a, 38–40; 1997b; Ciliberto 2011a, 34; Bassi 2013, 11–12. 68. Cicognani in Pico 1943; Marrucchi 1938; Averto 2014. 69. Matt. 5:48; Soffici 1941; Papini 1942, vii; Baum 2011, 243–246. 70. Papini 1942, 6, 9, 45, 51–53, 140–141, 144, 151–153; Soffici 1941, 117. 71. Papini 1942, 4–5, 14, 19, 25–26, 58, 143–144. 72. App. A.65, 68; Ba, 122 (243–244), 128 (253–254). 73. Garin to Papini, 1941, in Bassi 2013, 23, 25, 32–38; also Garin 1943a; 1997a, 23, from a chapter on “irrationalists, pragmatists and mystics,” where Garin is “certain that one ­t hing was clear to both Papini and Prezzoloni from the start, that the ­human is a locus of absolute freedom”; see also Ott 1993, 189, 284–288, 356–358; Donatelli 2002; Ciliberto 2011a, 100, 105, 113, 125; Rubini 2014, 174–175, 204–209, 219–227, 261–262, 266–268. 74. Pico 1942; Garin 1942a; Scapparone 2012; Ciliberto 2012, xvi–­x ix; Bassi 2013, 21–43, esp. 28–29. 75. Garin 1941, 1944, 1947a; Orsini 1949; Volpe 1991; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 153–154; Scapparone 2012, xiv, n. 41; Mecacci 2014, 278–280, 329–333, 442–443; http://­w ww​.­ispionline​.­it​/­it​/­istituto: the reviewer was Napoleone Orsini, who eventually patched ­t hings up with Garin. 76. Serri 2005, 104–106; Mecacci 2014, 15, 275–278, 283–284, 294. 77. Papini 1938, 15; Garin 1941, 18, 76; Terranova 1956, 436–441; Bassi 2013, ix–­ xiv, 1–11, 57; Mecacci 2014, 283–284. 78. Garin 1943b; in 1946c and 1946d, he assessed the “agitated pragmatism” of the young Papini, whom he knew only through his writings, but twenty years l­ ater the Cronache took a longer view of Papini’s “wandering from



Notes to Pages 127–133

547

‘pragmatism’ to ‘futurism’ and so on, from adventure to adventure, . . . ​ from a chaotic ideology of revolution to an extreme conservatism—­see-­ sawing and irritating in perennial discontent”; see 1997a, 25; also Bassi 2013, 40. 79. Toff anin 1950, 2:273–279, 382–385; 1954, where vii–­x xvii are Gianturco’s introduction; cf. Garin 1965, 3–9, 21–25; also Garin 1963; Anon. 1965b; Pignagnoli 1964b, 261–262, 271; Baum 2011, 246–249.

4. Pico Existentialist or Actualist? Garin 2011, 585. 1. Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 86–146, 533–642; Roberts 1981; Turi 2006, 570–575; Cesa 2009, 301–303, 306–307; Bassi 2013, 69–84, esp. 82–83; Mecacci 2014, 284–286; M. Ferrari 2016, 169–171. 2. De Certeau 1977; Cesa 2009, 300, n. 4; Mecacci 2014, 269–271. 3. Garin 1944, 1947; Cesa 2009, 318–319; Bassi 2013, 45, 59, 62–67; Mecacci 2014, 276, 294. 4. Garin 2000, 47; Ajello 2004; Mecacci 2014, 43–48, 272–275, 281–282. 5. Garin 2000, 24–25; Mecacci 2014, 273, 277, 281, 287, 441. 6. Garin 1947b, 1:v–vi, 364–365; 1966, 1:xiii–­x iv, 471–472; 1989a, 67–78; 1997a, v–­v iii, 23–32, 38–39, 44–51; 1998, 156–157; 2000, 12–19; Copenhaver 2005; Torrini 2005, 1–8; 2007, 9–16; Turi 2006, 528, 564–565; Cesa 2009, 299–300; Bassi 2011; 2013, 46–48, 60–62, 72–83; Ricci 2011, 393–395, 407–419; Rubini 2014, 252, 255–257; Ferrari 2016, 171, 176–184. 7. Garin 2011, 596–607. 8. Garin 1937, 219; on the ideological side of Garin’s scholarship, see Rubini 2014, 230–232, 239–240. 9. Gentile 1998, 133, 191, 248; for the pensante / pensato opposition, see Chapter 4.2–3 of this book; also Cesa 2009, 317; Garin 2011, 586. 10. Vasoli 2003, 81; see also Cambi 1992, 21–23. 11. Garin 1997a, 442–481, esp. 476–478, discussing the beginnings of Italian existentialism in a chapter on World War II, highlights the role of Nicola Abbagnano, who published an Introduction to Existentialism in 1942, following his Structure of Existence in 1939; Garin 1995b is a note on Cesare ­ uman Existence appeared at the Luporini, whose Situation and Freedom in H end of 1941, reviewed by Garin in 1942; in 1943 Luporini participated in an exchange on existentialism in Bottai’s Primato: Garin 1942c; 1989a, 83–84; 1998, 154; Abbagnano 1939, 1942; Luporini 1942, revised in 1945; Orwell 1983, 23; Turi 2006, 521–525; Ciliberto 2011a, 68–69, 130–131, 136; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 136–137, 142–146, 706; Carravetta 2013–2014; Marino 2017, 162–174.

548

Notes to Pages 133–139

12. Cesa 2003, 22–23. 13. Garin 2011, 585–590, which is a reprint of the 1945 edition; Rubini 2014, 260. 14. Garin 1968, 269–273; 1989a, 86–87; 1998, 154; see also Garin 1947c, 124, which—­even at this date, while discussing the Oration on man’s nature (Natur), essence (Wesen), condition (Bedingung), and existence (Existenz)—­ says nothing about Sartre’s claim that existence precedes essence: Der Mensch dagegen hat keine Natur, . . . ​hat kein Wesen. . . . ​Dieses klare Hinzielen auf eine Existenz, die in sich das Wesen zusammenzieht und ­ ere right (and if Garin ­were consistent about kein auflöst”; but if Sartre w Wesen), t­ here would be no essence for a prior existence to “pull together” or to “dissolve.” Garin’s reading of the Oration in 1947 was closer to Gentile’s actualism than to anyone’s existentialism: see Gentile 1916, 37–39; cf. Cesa 2009, 316–317. 15. Garin 1938; see Chapter 1.9 of this book for Mitford and Chapter 7.3 for Schiller. 16. Garin 1968, 269; 1989a, 86–87; Sartre 1946, 21–23, 65–66, 93; Papini 1947, 40. 17. Heidegger 1947; Garin 1947c; 1998, 158–159; Ciliberto 2011a, 41. 18. Garin 1946a: “a m ­ ental attitude, . . . ​the fashion of existentialism”; 1978, 101: “existentialism, . . . ​a general orientation . . . ​rather than a set of specific claims”; 1997a, 523, 540: “spreading in Italy during the Second World War . . . ​[existentialism] was actually a vague term often used to indicate a state of mind rather than a precise doctrine”; 2011, 590: “existentialism indicates a tendency rather than a precise direction”; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 131–132, 148, 169, 738; Cohen-­Salal 1999, 430–431; Baert 2015; 105, 151, 168–169. 19. Garin 1998, 158–159; 2000, 47; 2011; Turi 2006, 476–487; Ciliberto 2011a, 74; 2011b. 20. Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 99–117, 614. 21. Garin 2011, 583–584; Ciliberto 2011a, 9–15, 29, 32, 39, 50, 77, 111–115, 126. 22. Garin 2011, 578–579, 584–586; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 118–141; Ciliberto 2011a, 110–114; Bassi 2011, 366–367; Tessitore 2011, 343–344; cf. 347–351, 357, 364, on reversals of the judgment against Croce in the Cronache and elsewhere, including applause for concretezza; Rubini 2014, 252–253; Ferrari 2016, 172–173. 23. For an excellent analy­sis, see Spanio 2011, 95–126. 24. Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 40–44, 306. 25. Arist. Meta. 980a22–82a3; Spaventa 1972a, 3:128–129; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 48–53. 26. Aesch. Pr. 301; Gentile 1907, 198; 1998; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 131–136.



Notes to Pages 140–145

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27. Kant, CPR, 98; Gentile 1998, 81, 93–94, 98; on vari­ous senses of ‘positive,’ see Chapter 4.3 of this book. 28. Gentile 1998, 4–6, 8–9, 16, 43–49, 54–60, 67, 72, 81, 91–98, 103–107, 137, 142, 151, 184–185, 226, 245–250; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 131–135, 683–685. 29. Garin 1966, 3:1340–1341; 1997a, 372–373; 2011, 586; Cesa 2009, 319–321; for concretezza as a mantra, see Gentile 1998, 15, 28–30, 41, 54, 72, 81, 93, 95, 97, 101, 118, 127, 143, 169, 215, 218, 223–224, 230, 235, 253, 262. 30. Gen. 1:26; Coleridge 1836–1839, 4:82. 31. Moog 1919, 195: “Existentialismus . . . ​behauptet die Abhangigkeit des Logischen vom Existierenden”; Liebert 1933, 32; Frizell 1945. 32. Pareyson 1940; Garin 1946a, 62; 1989a, 83; 1995b, 145–146; Bobbio 1941, 111, 114; Luporini 1945; Abbagnano 1969, 9–11; Langiulli 1969, xix–­x x; Ciliberto 2011a, 19–20. 33. Garin 1946a, 60; Abbagnano et al. 1943 is the original publication in Primato, edited in Maiorca 1993, 87–162 ; Sartre 1946, 12, 21–25, 67–68, 89–95; Cohen-­Salal 1999, 421–458; Flynn 2014, 230–242, 259–265, 290–299; Baert 2015, 91–111. 34. Sartre 1946, 22–26, 36–37, 53–56, [144]; Garin 1946b; 1947b, 1:382–385; 1947d; 1952, 36–37; 1966, 1:492–495; 1968, 269; 1989a, 81–82; 1998, 153– 154; Bassi 2005, 350–351; Ciliberto 2011a, 68; 2012, xiii–­x iv; Rubini 2014, 268; Chapter 3.9 of this book. The h ­ uman “nullity that can be every­t hing” in Garin 1950a, 658–661, was an empty crucible for magical power. Garin 1950b, 182, described the h ­ uman condition as “absolute risk, absolutely unpredictable.” Gramsci was prominent, but not Sartre or existentialism, when Belfagor published a friendly appreciation of Garin’s ­c areer a few years ­later: see Terranova 1956. Without mentioning Garin, Di Napoli (1965, 400–403) wrote that “Pico’s thinking cannot possibly be understood in Sartre’s way, whereby a h ­ uman is nothing but choice.” 35. Luporini 1942, 3, described by Garin 1942c as “this very rich book by my friend Luporini,” and revisited in 1995b, 146–147, 151–153; also 1989a, 83–84. Like his friend, Garin described actualism along with existentialism as “vital forms of con­temporary thought” in 1942. 36. Garin 2011, 587, 599, 605–606; Ciliberto 2011a, 71–73; Ragghianti 2011, 467–475. ­Later in life, when Kristeller remembered the “existentialism” of his student days in Germany, he was also thinking of his teachers, Heidegger and Jaspers: Monfasani 2017, 85–86, 98–99. 37. Garin 2011, 601–604. 38. Safranski 1998, 348–352, 356–357; see also Ott 1993, 309–358; Farías 1987. 39. Heidegger 1947, 4.

550

Notes to Pages 146–153

40. Hegel 1970, 153; Heidegger 1962 is the classic En­glish version of the text in Heidegger 2001; for an introduction to the philosophy, see Gorner 2007, whose account I follow ­here. 41. Heidegger 1947, 60, 66–68. 42. Heidegger 2001, 42; 1947, 61, 68–74. 43. Heidegger 1947, 73–75. 44. Ibid., 63, 75, 99. 45. Ibid., 62–63, 95; Garin 1968, 269–273; 1989a, 86–87. 46. Heidegger 1947, 61–64, 87. 47. Ibid., 4, 49–50; Ott 1993, 284–288: Rubini 2014, 267, concludes that in November 1946, before Heidegger had replied to Sartre, Grassi still thought that his teacher’s essay on the Cave “could stand as a manifesto for an existential or Heideggerian [Re­nais­sance] ‘humanism.’ ” Perhaps Grassi, hoping against hope, had not read Heidegger’s piece all the way to the end. 48. Ott 1993, 309–351, esp. 336–341, provides the full statement by Jaspers; see also Safranski 1998, 279, 318–352. 49. Garin 2011, 590, 599, 601–606; Sartre 1946, 16–17; Ciliberto 2011a, 84–92, notes that Lavelle and Le Senne w ­ ere no longer on Garin’s radar by the early 1950s, ­a fter the elections of June 1946 had moved him farther to the left, into active politics briefly and ­toward Gramsci. 50. Garin 2011, 605–607; Heidegger 2001, 6. 51. Garin 2011, 586; Gentile 1998, 105; Chapter 4.2 of this book. 52. Garin 2011, 605–606; Cilberto 2011a, 68–69, 130; Cesa 2003, 33; Jodock 2000, 103; Dru and Trethowan 1994, 48–49, 52–53, 81–82; Chapter 4.3 of this book. 53. Blondel 2010, 42, 65, 159, 181, 302, 356–358, 361, 373, 377–379, 383–385, 391, 449, 452, 456, 472, 496, 504; Dru and Trethowan 1994, 45–57, 82–90; Jodock 2000, 20–21. 54. Lavelle 1937; Haight 1974, 632–635; Dru and Trethowan 1994, 14, 25–27, 58–67, 82; Jodock 2000, 2–6, 20–21, 111; Copleston 2003, 227–228, 245, 299–304, 307–311. 55. Gentile 1965, 1–75, esp. 49–50; Turi 2006, 11, 196–212; Jodock 2000, 24; Visentin 2006; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 99–119, 131–141. 56. See Garin’s comments in Gentile 1991, 450–451, 704–728, 758–771: this large and careful edition of Gentile’s works testifies to Garin’s re­spect for his patron’s philosophical achievement; see also Turi 2006, 516–517, 538–539. 57. Garin 2011, 584–607, which strangely does not mention Jean Wahl; Wahl published his ­Little History of Existentialism two years ­after Sartre’s speech, but since the early 1930s he had been writing on themes impor­tant to Garin, who discussed him in 1946; Wahl 1947; Drake 2005, 64–65; Crowell 2010, 1–2; Ciliberto 2011a, 32, 72–73, 98–99; Flynn 2014, 231–233. For



Notes to Pages 154–156

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impor­tant assessments—­dif­fer­ent from mine—of existentialism in Garin’s work, see Ciliberto 2011a, 30–34; Hankins 2011; and Rubini 2014, 157–164, 233–234, 241, 266, 268–269, 271; also Webber 2018 for even stricter limits on ‘existentialism.’ If, as Rubini says, Abbagnano 1939 was a “manifesto of Italian existentialism,” it was a movement that came too late to aff ect Garin’s 1937 book. Rubini connects Abbagnano’s “positive existentialism” (mainly a postwar conception, responding in 1948 to Sartre and Heidegger) with Garin, calls Pico “an existentialist deprovincializer,” and describes Garin’s Humanismus of 1947 as “existential scholarship through and through.” Even if that ­were so—in some loose sense of ‘existential’—­the description would not apply to Garin 1937. On vari­ous incompatible senses of ‘positive’ in Italian philosophy, in addition to Abbagnano et al. 1943 and Abbagnano 1948, see Garin 1997a, 97–99, 111–112, 126–127, 151–161, 166–170; Capati 1997, 96–98; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 53–59, 371–400. 58. Campana 1946; Kristeller 1961b, 1961c; Kraye 1996; Hankins 2001; Grendler 2006a; King 2014, 52–55; Copenhaver 2016b, 2018a; OED, s.v. ‘humanism,’ where the only listing before 1790, marked “obsolete and rare,” is an allegory on vices from 1619: “Simony . . . ​, Bribery, Humanisme, Malice, all the whelps of Acheron, all the weedes of the infernall banks, with pale-­fac’d Incontinence, and giddy-­braind Intemperance.” Humanism as “the doctrine that Christ’s nature was ­human only and not divine” starts in 1790, “expertise in the humanities” in 1836, an “ideology which places h ­ umans . . . ​ at its centre” in 1848, and in 1853 an “ethical theory . . . ​characterized by a stress on ­human rationality . . . ​and a rejection of theistic religion and the super­natural.” 59. Black 2002, 273–275, observes correctly that researchers in the pre­sent can “detect the presence of a humanist text” whose author from the past, just by writing in a certain way, has made “an implicit declaration of his affinity with the humanist movement.” Nonetheless, in the absence of any emic ‘humanism,’ the etic term, even if used carefully, lets a number of confusions stand, which are the topic of this section. For the quotations, see Pasnau 2011, 4, 84, 93, 419, 473, and, for related material, 1–5, 77–83, 92–95, 224, 440–441. 60. App. A.36–7; Ba, 68–70 (142–150). 61. Wittgenstein 1968, 146 (¶546); Brooks 2013; Copenhaver 2016b, with the En­glish version in 2018a, on difficulties about identifying the ‘humanists’ who worked in the Re­nais­sance; see the response in Meroi 2017. 62. Brucker 1742–1744, 4:1.30–32; Copenhaver 2016b examines the ‘humanism’ v. ‘scholasticism’ antithesis in the period before Descartes; see also Chapter 5.1 of this book. 63. Düwell 2014; Steenbekkers 2014, 86; for ‘dignity’ and its ideologies, see Chapter 1 of this book; also Debes 2017 and Copenhaver 2017a.

552

Notes to Pages 157–162

64. Chapters 1.3 and 7.2–3 of this book; Ciliberto 2017; and Copenhaver 2016b; 2018a. 65. Chapters 3.3 and 5–7 of this book. 66. Section 3 of this chapter. 67. Kant, GMM, 68–69; Brooks 2013, 2016; Steenbekkers 2014; Wieseltier 2015, 14; Chapter 1.3 of this book. 68. Breen 1952; Bausi 1996; Panizza 1996; on ‘humanism’ and ‘classicism’ according to Georg Voigt and Remigio Sabbadini, see Chapter 2.1 of this book.

5. Pico Sainted More 1997b, 103. 1. Bainton 1969, 58–59, 101, 129–130. 2. Drummond 1873, 1:150–158; Bainton 1969, 109; Webb 2016. 3. Erasmus 1898, 15, 21, 24, 38–40, 44–48, 57–61, 70–71, 86, 105, 109–113, 121, 154, 185; 1703–1706, translated in Erasmus 1978. 4. Erasmus 1898, 101–110. 5. My reading of the Folly relies on Screech 1988, 7–13, 75, 97–107, 117–127; see also Copenhaver 2017b, 13–20. 6. Pl. Phd. 80D–81A; Erasmus 1898, 182; Screech 1988, 75–83. 7. 1Cor. 1:25; Erasmus 1898, 180–181, 186–189; Screech 1988, 8–9, 52–67, 104–105. 8. ­After a thorough search for Pico in the works and letters of Erasmus, Margolin 1997, 574–576, concluded that “one cannot say that Pico influenced Erasmus directly” and noted that he “scarcely took notice of the prince’s notion of a poet-­t heologian.” 9. More 1997b, 75–93; Ficino 1495 is the first edition of his letters, published on March 11, 1495, sixteen months before Pico’s letters in B, sigs. RRiiiv–­ VVvir, released on July 16 of the next year; Ficino 1990–­is a critical edition of his Latin letters, and 1975–­is an En­glish translation; Ficino 2001 reprints a sixteenth-­century Italian version; in Ficino 1959, the Pico letters are on 858, 869, 873, 879–880, 885–886, 888–891, 893, 895, 897, 900–902, 906–907, 914, 930, 932, 937, 949, 958; Sebastiano Gentile 1994, 141–142, situates Pico in Ficino’s epistolary and describes the relevant letters briefly. Copenhaver 2011 was written before the conference in 2004 at which I read an e­ arlier version—an ancestor of this chapter. At that time, I was unaware of Francesco Bausi’s work on Pico’s letters, which he has kindly shared with me: see Bausi 1998, 1999, 2004. Seeing ­t hese excellent articles, I was delighted to learn that we had reached generally the same conclusions about



Notes to Pages 162–168

553

Giafrancesco Pico’s strong presence in the first edition, edited by him, of his ­ ncle’s epistolary. u 10. Garin 1994c, 254–279; see also 1942b; his introduction in Pico 1942, 29, n. 1, 46–50; Sebastiano Gentile 1994, 141–142; Bausi 2004, 365–366; Copenhaver 2011, 192–198: Pico’s letters have now been edited by Francesco Borghesi, to whom I am grateful for access to his work in pro­gress; see Borghesi 2000, 2004, and especially 2018, which appeared too late for this book to profit from it. 11. B, sig. QQiiv, discussed by Di Napoli 1965, 265–266; for other comments by Gianfrancesco on his editorial work, see Gianfrancesco Pico 1573, 1299– 1300, 1329–1330, passages analyzed by Farmer 1998, 159, n. 74; cf. Copenhaver 2011, 186–190; and the review of Farmer 1998 by Deitz 2005. On the chaos, see Garin 1994c, 254; and in Pico 1942, 3–4, 46–50: “It would be hard to imagine anything more disor­ga­nized and confused, any lack of a criterion more complete, any more systematic alteration of ­every direction implied by good sense.” 12. Concl.; B, fol. [1r], sigs. av v, QQiiv; the best analy­sis of Pico’s style is Bausi 1996: See 190–192 for Gianfrancesco’s assessment. 13. B, sigs. a–­a xi, for Vit.; also QQiiv: a Latin text of the Life, based on several early editions, is printed with an En­glish translation in More 1997a, 294– 340; for the Latin text with an Italian translation, see Gianfrancesco Pico 1994, for whom the best guide is still Schmitt 1967; Garin 1994c, 231–232, notes Pico’s own doubts about the Oration; Bausi 1999 discusses Savonarola’s influence on Gianfrancesco’s portrait of Pico as a “lay saint”; also Bausi 1994, 36–38; 1998, 14–15. 14. B, sigs. av, aiiv–­iiir; the picture of hell is from Anon. 1483, sig. L3v. 15. B, fol. [1r], sigs. aix–­x i; Gen. 25:13; Isa. 21:16–17; Ps. 120:5–6, (Vulg. 119:5); Savonarola 1965, 104, 506, which could be a digest of a longer sermon; also 1989, 225–226, 437–438; Weinstein 1970, 215–216; Heff ernan 1988, 28–32, 66–71, 265–267; Garfagnini 1997b, 254–256; Chapter 5.5 of this book. 16. B, sig. ax r; Dorez 1898 discussed the circumstances of Pico’s death, and Garin 1937, 47, repeated his conclusion in a note: “It appears that Pico died of poisoning by his secretary, Cristoforo di Casal Maggiore,” who owed Pico money and worked for the Medici against Savonarola. In 2013 this was still news on the internet: http:www​.­rainews​.­articoli​/­medici​-­poliziano​-­pico​ -­mirandola​-­assassinio​-­arsenico​-­omicidio​-­; cf. Poletti 1987; Chapter 3.1 of this book. 17. B, sigs. aiiv, iiir; Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 11–15; the ­family told other stories portraying Margherita as a stalker in order to absolve the saintly Pico of all blame: see Anon. 1874, 45–46; Chapter 5.1 of this book. 18. B, sig. av v.

554

Notes to Pages 168–179

19. B, sigs. RRiiiv–­v, VVv–vi, YYiiiiv–­v iir; More 1997b, 51–52, 75–123. 20. More 1997b, 110, also xxxvii–­x liv on More’s Lyfe and the circumstances of its publication; Marius 1985, 34–39; also Chambers 1958, 19, 92–24; Weiss 1965, 1:146–8; Gilmore 1965; Parks 1976; Valcke 1989. 21. More 1997b, 49–52, 75–123, 340–381; also xxxvii–xl of the introduction to the Yale edition. 22. B, sigs. RRiv, VVv r; More 1997b, 78–80, 89–90, 342–345, 356–357; Holbein’s nun is in Anon. 1538, sig. Diiiv. 23. B, sig. TTvi; More 1997b, 86–87, 350–351. 24. B, sig. RRiiiv; More 1997b, 80, 343–345. 25. Greenblatt 1980, 51–52; cf. Nauert 1995, 116, 143–144. 26. Greenblatt 1980, 11–13, 16, 22, 32, 38–58. 27. App. A.29; Ba, 54 (113); Chapters 11.4 and 12.2 of this book. 28. B, sigs. YYvi–­v ii; More 1997b, 94–103, 362–376. 29. B, sigs. YYiv v–­Y Yv; More 1997b, 103–109, 372–376; Chapter 1.6–8 of this book. 30. B, sig. YYv v; More 1997b, 109–113, 376–377. 31. B, sig. VVvi; More 1997b, 120–123, 378–381. 32. B, sig. aiiir; More 1997b, 60, 304–305; Dilemmi 1994, vi–­v ii, 22, 28, 39, 63. 33. Dilemmi 1994, 65–66. 34. B, sig. aiiir; More 1997b, 60, 304–305; Dilemmi 1994, viii. 35. B, sigs. ai–­x i; More 1997b, 55–56, 62. 36. More 1997b, 56, 59–60, 63–64, 66. 37. B, sigs. aiiv–­v ir; More 1997b, 58, 60, 300–301, 304–315. 38. B, sigs. aiv–­v r; More 1997b, 304–307, 312–315. 39. B, sigs. aiv–­iir; also aiiiir, aviiv for Gianfrancesco’s praise of Pico’s mastery of Hebrew for Bible study and apol­o­getics—in order to attack Jews with their own weapons; More 1997b, 57, 299. 40. B, sigs. av v, aviiv–­i x r, RRiiiv–­v, VVv–vi, YYiiiiv–­v iir; More 1997b, 49–52, 69, 75–123, 328–329, 340–381. 41. Copenhaver 2011, 192–198. 42. B, sig. aiiii; also. aiir. 43. Garin 1937, 8–10, 37–48; Weinstein 1970, 99–100, 211; Copenhaver 2011, 192–198. 44. B, sigs. RRiiiv–­v, VVv–­v ir; Bausi 2004, 368–369; Copenhaver 2011, 192–198. 45. Chapters 3, 4, 6–10 of this book. 46. Copenhaver 2011, 192–198. 47. Ficino 1975–­, 6:45; 7:15–16, 26, 32, 40–41, 44, 58, 64–65, 67–74, 77: the numbering of Ficino’s books does not correspond to the volumes of the En­glish Letters. 48. Ficino 1975–­, 7:15–16, 26–28, 40–41, 44; Allen 1995b, 417–421; 2008, 83–85.



Notes to Pages 180–188

555

49. Ficino 1975–­, 7:58, 64–65, 67–74. 50. Matt.13:46; Ficino 1975–­, 7:32–33; Kristeller 1937, 1:56–57. 51. Ficino 1975–­, 7:77; 8:4–85, 13, 21–22, 24–25, 28–29, 53. 52. Ficino 1975–­, 9.10, 12, 65; 1017, 23; 1495, sigs. c l xxx ix, c l xxxx iiii; Allen 1989, 34–48; 1995b; 2003, 144. 53. Ficino 1975–­, 10:51; 1495, sigs. c l xxx ix, c l xxxx iiii–­c l xxxx v ii r ; Marcel 1958, 544–554; Allen 1995c; 1998, 11–13. 54. B, sigs. av, VVvi–­Y Yiv. 55. B, sig. YYiv; Kristeller 1937, 2:91–93; Sebastiano Gentile 1986; Marcel 1965, 228–229; Allen 2008, 83–85. 56. B, sigs. av r, YYiv v; Allen 2003, 144. 57. Weinstein 1970, 73, 220–226; Bausi 2004, 368–369; Gianfrancesco did not finish his Life of the friar ­until 1530, and it circulated only in manuscript ­until 1674: see Garfagnini 1998; Schisto, “Introduzione,” in Gianfrancesco Pico 1999, 17–26. 58. Crinito 1955, 104–105; Garin 1937, 8–10; Weinstein 1970, 207–217; Bausi 1999, 74–75, 88–90. 59. B, sigs. aix–­x; Chapter 5.2 of this book. 60. B, sig. ax v. 61. B, sigs. ax v–xi. 62. Ficino 1495, sig. c l xxxx v ii r ; Weinstein 1970, 185–226; Celenza 2001, 34–52. 63. B, sig. ax v; Copenhaver 2011, 192–198. 64. Bausi 1999, 75–76; 2004, 368–369; Copenhaver 2011, 192–198. 65. B, sigs. RRiiiv–­SSiv v, TTiv v–­V Vvir. 66. B, sigs. av v, QQiiv, RRiiiv–­Ssiii, VVv–vi, YYiiiiv–­v iir: “You ­w ill also find vari­ous letters (since it would have been too difficult to collect them all),” indicating that Gianfrancesco was at least aware of other letters, w ­ hether or not he saw or could have seen them. For a dif­fer­ent “holy ambition,” see App. A.11; Ba, 22 (47); and Chapter 11.5 of this book. Bausi 1998 edits the letter to Lorenzo and dates it to 1486, explaining that this l­ ater date would have been less con­ve­nient for Gianfrancesco’s biography of his ­uncle. 67. B, sigs. RRiv v–­v r, SSiiiv–­iiv; Sewell 1957. 68. B, sig. SSiv; Bausi 1999, 76–78. 69. B, sig. SSiv v; Bausi 1999, 76–78. 70. B, sigs. SSiv v–­v r; Bausi 2004, 369–370; Copenhaver 2011, 192–198. 71. B, sigs. SSv v, SSviv, TTir. 72. B, sigs. TTiiv, v r, vir. 73. B, sigs. SSiiiv, iv v, vir, TTir, ii. 74. B, sigs. TTiv–­iir. 75. B, sig. TTi.

556

Notes to Pages 189–196

76. B, sig. TTv v. 77. B, sigs. TTvi–­V Vir. 78. B, sig. VViv; Chapter 5.1–2 of this book. 79. B, sigs. VVi–­iv r. 80. B, sig. aiiv, VViv; Weinstein 1970, 212–215. 81. 1Cor. 1:23; B, sigs. VVv–­v ir. 82. Concl. 83. Copenhaver 2011, 186–190; Bausi 2004, 368–369. 84. Chapters 1.2, 4.3, 9.3, and 10.1–2 of this book. 85. Giovio 1577; Zimmermann 2001. 86. Giovio 1577, 50–51. 87. Kepler 1606, 30–31; Reuchlin 1517, fol. xiii v ; Westman 2011, 320–397, esp. 396. 88. Morhof 1708, 38–39; Albrecht 1994, 227; Blair 2010, 166–168. 89. Henry More 1653, sig. A7v; Traherne 1908, 298; Colby 1947; Salter 1965. 90. Traherne 1908, 294–299; Gelli 1557 is the first En­glish version, but other translations followed in Traherne’s day and l­ater: Gelli 1681, 1702, 1744; see also Parmentier 1531; Boaistuau 1559, 6; Pérez de Oliva 1982, 23–24; Simonin in Boaistuau 1982, 9–28; Gutwirth 1987, 37–38, 42–43; Garin 1989b, 125–131; Doukas 2011, 184–189; Manetti 2018; Chapter 1.4 of this book. A ­ fter the sixteenth ­century, dignidad was a delicate issue in Spain. A Diálogo de la dignidad del hombre published by Fernán Pérez de Oliva in 1546 was soon translated into French and Italian but appeared on the Index in 1632 and stayed ­there: the National Library in Madrid still kept it sealed in 1863. Manetti’s book on dignitas, partly adversarial in structure like the Diálogo, seems to have been its main model. That Pérez de Oliva read Pico’s Oration has been suggested but also denied by students of the Diálogo. Likewise, the Oration’s influence on Pierre Boaistuau’s Bref Discours de l’excellence et dignité de l’homme has been called “questionable.” As far as I can see, t­ here is no sign of the Oration in the Discours, which cites both Manetti and Facio. Boaistuau’s books on marvels and monsters w ­ ere enormously popu­lar: even before the Discours was absorbed into a larger ἀ éâtre du Monde, it went through seven editions between 1558 and 1562. The mood was the same but the topic smaller in Jean Parmentier’s Description nouvelle des merveilles de ce monde et de la dignite de lhomme, a long poem published in 1531, two years a­ fter the explorer returned from Sumatra. 91. Anon. 1717, 84–86; see Traherne 2014 for previously unpublished works found in a Lambeth Palace manuscript and described by Inge and Macfarlane 2000. 92. Anon. 1717, sig. A2r; Traherne 1903; Garin 1989b, 67–68, discusses Traherne.



Notes to Pages 196–203

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93. Jesup 1723a, sig. b2; 1723d, 87, 90–91; Gilberte Pascal 1684, and for a modern edition, Pascal 1954, 3–34; Levine 1991, 274; section 3 of this chapter. 94. Jesup 1723c, sig. b3v; 1723d. 95. Jesup 1723c, 20, 35, 43, 57–58. 96. Jesup 1723b, sig. b3v, 6, 11–13; More 1997b, 62; Chapter 4.4 of this book. 97. More 1997b, 60–63, 316–321; B, sigs. aiiir, avi. 98. Jesup 1723b, 12–13; More 1997b, 62, 319; B, sig. avi. 99. Jesup 1723b, sig. b3v, 8–11, 20–22; B, sigs. aiiv–­iiir. 100. Pascal 1954, 1106 (84), 1148 (227), 1206 (438); Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.ii.273. 101. Pascal 1954, 1146 (210), 1156–1157 (255, 264), and for other thoughts about dignité, 1202 (424), 1209 (439), 1296 (659). 102. Pascal 1954, 1108 (84); Concl. 40, 48; see Secret 1955 on De omni scibili and Watkin 2013 for a recent case of its false attribution to Pico as a book title; also Pignagnoli 1964a, 201–202, on “comparing Pico and Pascal, . . . ​t he humanism of the first and the anti-­humanism of the second.” Fornaciari 1998, 110, points out that the Hebrew language is a key to “what­ever is knowable” in another thesis. 103. Gilberte Pascal 1684, 13.

6. Pico Raving Kant, CT, 382. 1. Stanley 1701, sigs. av, b2v, c v, d2r, 178; Traherne 1908, 298; Malusa 1993, 168– 169, 172–173, 176–193; Chernaik 2004: Garin 1974, 46, wrote that the “place of Pico’s fortune in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries was marked by ambiguity . . . ​­until a more careful pro­cess of historical judgment ripened in the nineteenth ­century.” 2. Horn 1655, 311–312, 324, citing Concl., 25; App. C.10.2UR1. 3. Horn 1655 281, 286–291, 296–297, 303, 314–315; Malusa 1993, 236–237, 241–245. 4. App. A.53; Ba, 96–98 (200–205); B, sig. av r. 5. Horn 1655, 292, 323–324; Malusa 1993, 238–241, 244–245, 251–252; Albrecht 1994, 250–251. 6. Olearius 1711; Malusa 1993, 178–179, 191–194, 200, 207–208, 224–227; Albrecht 1994, 46–49, 251–258, 490; Bottin and Longo 2011, 308. 7. Hor. Epist. 1.1.14; Voss 1657, 109–117, esp. 109, 114; Malusa 1993, 205–207, 225–228; Albrecht 1994, 46–49, 251–258. 8. Brucker 1742–1744, 5:3–4; Catana 2008, 1–31, esp. 24; Kelly 2001 summarizes the development of eclecticism before, during, and a­ fter the Enlightenment.

558

Notes to Pages 203–215

9. Catana 2008, 23, 29–31; Copenhaver and Schmitt 1992, 196–198. 10. App. A.46; Ba, 82–86 (177–185); Alsted 1624, 300; Albrecht 1994, 107–110, 160–164, 222–223, 384–387, 390; Hotson 2000, 11–13, 80–90, 160–163, 174, 223–230. 11. Diog. L. 1.21; Plut. De frat. amor. 490B; Pinson 1968, 80–83; Donini 1988; Albrecht 1994, 104, 186; Hochstrasser 2000, 84–85; Merkt 2001, 37–73; Callisen 2012. 12. Jakob Thomasius 1665; Sturm 1686; Leibniz 1875–1890, 4:152; Bienert 1934; Schmitt 1966, 506, 530–532; Albrecht 1994, 295–301, 309–331, 398–405, 409–416; cf. Bottin and Longo 2011, 301–305, 315–323; Micheli 1993, 385, 415–417; Hanegraaff 2012, 102–107. 13. Thomasius 1688, 13, 22, 32, 40–46; 1712a, 8; Beck 1969, 249–251; Hochstrasser 2000, 136–137; Hunter 2001, 207–208, 218–221; Bottin and Longo 2011, 315–323. 14. Ahnert 2006, 9–17; Hochstrasser 2000, 113–129; Hunter 2001, 197–200. 15. Beck 1969, 255–256; Albrecht 1994, 434–445, 530–533; Hunter 2001, 210– 211, 216–217; 265–273; Bottin and Longo 2011, 315, 343–345. 16. B, sig. aii; Budde 1702b, 179–200; 1709–1714, 2:198; 1731, 391–392; for the same treatment of the Oration in a fuller biography, see Jöcher 1750–1751, which is l­ ater, larger, and more specialized than Budde’s Allgemeines historisches Lexicon; Chapters 5.9 and 11.1 of this book. 17. Budde 1701, 3.275–276; Bottin and Longo 2011, 303–308, 343; Albrecht 1994, 434–445. 18. Albrecht 1994, 493–496; Longo 2011a, 399–406; Hanegraaff 2012, 130–136. 19. Heumann 1715, 467–471; 1716, 650; Longo 2011a, 413–415, 422–423. 20. Brucker 1742–1744; Longo 2011b; Catana 2008, 11–34; Hanegraaff 2012, 137–147. 21. Brucker 1742–1744, 4:353–357, 610, 620–622, 628–632, 644, 689–695, 750, 752–754. 22. B, sigs. aiir–­iiir; Brucker 1742–174, 4:55–61, 354; Catana 2008, 23, 29–32; Longo 2011b, 533. 23. Diderot 1751–1772, 5:270–271; Longo 2011b, 557–558. 24. Jaucourt 1751–1752. 25. D’Alembert 1751–1772a, 1:ii, xx–­x xi. 26. Ibid., 1:917; Kant, CPR, 13; Levine 1991, 135, 150, 178. 27. Bayle 1740, 1:107, 131, 136, 270, 416; 2:543; 3:758, 769; 4:159; Voltaire 1756, 14–15; Moréri 1759, 8:318, citing Naudé 1653, 499–502, on whom see section 2 of this chapter. 28. Croce 1947, 1–35; Pocock 1999, 169–239. 29. App. C.17.T2M1; Concl. 56; Apol. 55; Voltaire 1963, 2:87–89. 30. Voltaire 1963, 1:763–769; 2:81–85, 170, 217–25, 568–588; Bullen 1994, 19–24.



Notes to Pages 215–223

559

31. Voltaire 1963, 2:87, 169. 32. Ibid., 2:86–88; Pascal 1954, 1221 477; Chapter 7.2 of this book. 33. Copenhaver 2015a, 284–291, 331–362. 34. Kant, A, 489; DS, 452; Naudé 1653, 499–502; Colomiès 1709, 699; Joensen 1716, 121–122; Eneroth 1761; Badaloni 1965, 381–388; Firpo 1965, 369–371; Micheli 1993, 388–390; OED, s.v. ‘Cabbala,’ 2b, examples from 1641 to 1795. 35. Apol. 48–49, 59–60; Blount 1690, 350–352; Secret 1964, 240–242; Hamilton 1999, 94–96; Koller 2005; Pritchard 2009; Black 2014, 239–252; Chapter 13.1 of this book. 36. App. A.64; Ba, 118 (235); Secret 1964, 255–272; Hamilton 1999, 7–8, 32–36, 239, 242–243, 264–265; Rummel 2002; Copenhaver and Kokin 2014; Copenhaver 2015a, 363–427. 37. Garsias 1489, sigs. hiiiir–­oiiir; Thorndike 1923–1958, 4:496–503; Campanini 2014, 169–170. 38. Garcaeus 1576, 140; Thorndike 1923–1958, 4:540–541, 560, 572, 575; 5:79–80, 107, 120, 140, 171, 191, 199, 227, 262–263, 278, 295–296, 318–319, 325, 329–330, 380, 393, 481, 646, 655; 6:20, 23, 104–105, 107, 119, 160, 169–172, 193, 198, 201, 210, 232, 359, 375, 379, 412, 597–598; 7:19–20, 108–109, 115–117, 131, 139, 390, 449–450, 477–484; 8:303, 325–326; Castelli 1994, 1998b; Westman 2011, 320–397, esp. 396. 39. App. C.8, 19; Concl. 24–28, 60–69; Apol. 47–60; Anon. 1578; Secret 1964, 19, 32, 44–54, 85, 96–97, 126–133, 279–280; Hamilton 1999, 149–150; Badia et al. 2016, 211; Zambelli 1995, 74–80. 40. Apol. 2; Hier. Prol. in Job; Skalić 1559, 551–629, 646; Krabbel 1916; Thorndike 1923–1958, 6:455–457; Secret 1957; 1958, 543–545; 1964, 323–324; Zambelli 1977; 1995, 155–162; Carotti 2018. 41. Simon 1682, 1:49, 190; 2:77; 3:27, 127–129; Martì 1687, frontispiece; Secret 1964, 328–329, 337–339; Kaplan and Popkin 1989; Reynolds and Wilson 2013, 188–190; Dweck 2011, 19, 58, 151–169. 42. Gaff arel 1625, 1651; Naudé 1653, 499; Pintard 2000, 438, 448; Campanini 2007, 305–320; Copenhaver 2015a, 331–351, 378–386. 43. Gaff arel 1625, 8, 15, 33–36, 40–41, 62; 1651, 34, 37; Thorndike 1923–1958, 7:304–309; Pintard 2000, 164–168, 187–190, 223–224, 254, 273–274, 348–349. 44. Gaff arel 1651, 5–6; Wolf 1715–1733, 1.sigs. a–­civ, separately at the end of the book; ibid. 2.1245; W, 15, 106–219, 204–205; Wirszubski 1963, 59–65; Secret 1964, 26–27; Dweck 2011, 158–159. 45. App. A.64–67; Ba, 124–128 (245–251); Simon 1682, 1:54, 136; 2:29, 33, 40, 77; 3:27, 108–109, 124–125, 156; Selden 1725, 1:1273, 1587–1590; Black 2014, 231–232, 252. 46. Knorr von Rosenroth 1677, 1684; Scholem 1973, 114–125; Coudert 1995, 48; 1999, 100–136.

560

Notes to Pages 224–233

47. 2Cor. 11:13; Knox 1994, 8–25, 117–138; La Vopa 1998, 87–88; McGinn 1999; OED s.v. ‘enthusiasm.’ 48. Burton 1972, 311–313, 340–345. 49. More 1672b, 1–5, 29–36; Knox 1994, 139–142, 148–160; Crocker 1990a, 1990b; Fouke 1997, 5–9, 124–133, 151–152, 167–175; Pocock 1998; fig. 10 is a detail from Hogarth’s “Credulity, Superstition and Fanat­i­cism,” originally titled “Enthusiasm Delineated.” 50. Spener 1676; Pinson 1968, 13–17, 36, 66–68; Gawthorp 1993, 110–111; Ahnert 2006, 20–26; Shantz 2013, 26–30, 86–91, 95. 51. Beck 1969, 249–252; Stoeffler 1973, 4–5; Gawthorp 1993, 105–107, 117–118; Ahnert 2006, 10–15; Shantz 2013, 16–19, 112–116. 52. Christian Thomasius 1693, 1724b; Pinson 1968, 78–79; Stoeffler 1973, 172– 175; Gierl 1997, 418–419, 430–438, 43–50; Hochstrasser 2000, 112, 121; Ahnert 2006, 10–15, 30–31, 116–117, 169; Shantz 2013, 110, 119–120. 53. 1Thess. 5:21; Hor. Epist. 1.1.14; Christian Thomasius 1697, 1699, 1701, 1712b; Gierl 1997, 426–429, 441, 451–458, 466, 499–507; Hochstrasser 2000, 123– 124, 136–137; Hunter 2001, 6–7, 64–69, 146–147, 197–265; Ahnert 2006, 45; Section 1 of this Chapter. 54. Beck 1969, 319–325, 368–369; Beiser 1993, 1–8, 75–76, 193–196, 219–222; Pinkard 2002, 90–98; Chapter 7.2 of this book. 55. Kant, CPR, x; CJ, 35; La Vopa 1998, 105–112; Chapter 7.2 of this book. 56. Arnold 1740–1742, 3.sig. )(4r; Spinoza, TTP, 19:1; Beck 1969, 252; Stoeffler 1973, 175–182; Beiser 1993, 48–52; Ahnert 2006, 63–66; Hanegraaff 2012, 120–127. 57. Matt. 19:14; Frey 1753, 17, 20, 39–331; Voltaire 1963, 2:87–89; Pinson 1968, 88–90; Beck 1969, 296–298; Knox 1994, 413–417; Shantz 2013, 253–258.

7. Liberty, Enthusiasms, and Grace Kant, CT, 395–396.

1. Chapters 2.2 and 6.1 of this book. 2. B, sig. aviv; Benzoni 1993; Dean 1993; Romanello 1993. 3. Romanello 1993. 4. Manzotti 1964; Menozzi 1979; Car­ter 1987, 50–74, 122–148; Di Pietro Lombardi 1996, 36–37. 5. Matt. 19:21; Tiraboschi 1772–1782; Brooke 1959, 83–86; Manzotti 1964; Menozzi 1979, 450–454; Di Pietro Lombardi 1996, 22–24, 35–38, 52, 103, 119–120; Chapter 6.1 of this book. The first volumes of Tiraboschi’s History to be printed identified him as “della Compagnia di Gesù.”



Notes to Pages 233–242

561

6. Venturi 1969, 136–186; Metzger 1987, 191–201; Barnett 2003, 168–200; Imbruglia 2012. 7. Tiraboschi 1780, 278–287; 1781–1786, 4.95–108; 1793–1795, 4.173–176, 208; Fumagalli 1997, 48–51; Di Pietro Lombardi 1996, 69–91, 96, 103, 116–117; Wright 2008; Chapter 1.1 of this book. 8. Tiraboschi 1781–1786, 4.95–108; 1793–1795, 4.196–197. 9. Tiraboschi 1780, iii–­v. 10. Ibid., 56, 81 86, 88, 132, 197, 278, 282. 11. Ibid., 259, 265, 267, 277, 282–284, 287; Brucker 1742–1744, 4:1.52; Chapter 5.2 of this book. 12. B, tpv; Tiraboschi 1780, 284–287; Chapter 6.2 of this book. 13. Di Pietro Lombardi 1996, 104–108; De Sanctis 2002. 14. Bartoli 1797, 169–172, 180–185; Manzini 1878, 14–19; Ceretti 1890, 134–137; Manzotti 1964; Menozzi 1979, 450–458, 465–477; Giuntella 1990, 20–22, 66–67, 208–224: Bartoli also defended the loyalty oath required by the new Cisalpine Republic ­a fter Napoleon won at Lodi in 1796. 15. Bartoli 1791, 16–19, 80, 123, writing at p. 16 that Pico wanted la bella gloria di crearsi da se medesimo; Ceretti 1890, 135. See also Casari 1965, 432–433, for a dif­fer­ent Oration in a manuscript mistakenly attributed by Bartoli (pp. 57–65) to Pico—­w ith Tiraboschi’s agreement. 16. Bartoli 1791, tp, i–­v, xii; Menozzi 1979, 460–465; Romanello 1993; https://­en​ .­w ikipedia​.­org​/­w iki​/­Timeline​_­of​_­t he​_­French_ Revolution. 17. Bartoli 1791, vii–­x, xiii, 188–189. 18. Ibid., 2–5, 95, 103, 108. 19. Ibid., 20–21. 20. Ibid., 17, 28–29. 21. Ibid., 28–29, 30–36, 136–158; Thomas 1765, 4. 22. Bartoli 1791, 102–105; Thomas 1765, 14, 21, 68, 149, 156; Vartanian 1958, 184–185; France 2002, 90–92. 23. Bartoli 1791, 5, 18, 76–110, esp. 79–85. 24. Ibid., 64, 95–99, 106–110, 128–129, 159. 25. Ibid., 11, 15, 44, 54, 85, 121–122, 137–139; on Tennemann, see Chapters 1.3 and 8.1 in this book. 26. Tiraboschi 1780, 284–287; Menozzi 1979 is the most informative recent account of Bartoli. 27. Pozzetti 1794; Chapter 6.3 in this book. 28. Chapter 6.1 of this book. 29. Kant, CPR, 24–29; Ullmann 1967; Cohen 1994, 21–27. 30. Hamann 1759, 1762, 1951; Beck 1969, 366–376; Beiser 1993, 16–41; Berlin 1993.

562

Notes to Pages 243–253

31. Lessing 1773–1781, vol. 4; 1778; Vallée 1988, 1–56; Beiser 1993, 44–46, 52–62; Groetsch 2015, 1–4; Israel 2013, 315–325, 684–720; Chapter 6.3 of this book. 32. Beck 1969, 367–368; Beiser 1993, 47–48, 53–55, 59–72, 80–89. 33. Mendelssohn 1785; Reinhold 1786 is the first letter; the collection is Reinhold 1789; Beiser 1993, 3–8, 44–48, 72–79, 98–102. 34. Kant, WO, 268–269, 272–274, 278–281; Beiser 1993, 115–118. 35. Kant, WO, 267–268; DS, 923, 952, 959, 970; Wizenmann 1787, 117, 123; Beiser 1993, 110–113, 118–122. 36. Kant, CpR, 191, 207–209, 300–301. 37. Kant, A, 413–416, 423–424, 433–435, 456–457, 472, 498–499, 521–524; CF, 312; CJ, 102, 307–310, 364–366; P, 185–186; RS, 776–777; WO, 267–268, 278–279. 38. Kant, A, 413–414, 423–424, 472; CF, 312; MM, 625–626; WO, 281–282. 39. Kant, CF, 327–328, 340; CJ, 424–426; CpR, 197–198; GMM, 38; MM, 412–413; P, 126; RL, 846–847. 40. Kant, CF, 327–328, 345–347, 352–353; WO, 278–282. 41. Kant, CJ, 198–204, 295; IUH, 41–43; MM, 517, 577, 588–589; ObS, 832–834; RL, 721–722. 42. Kant, A, 457, 498–499; CF, 304; CJ, 202, 309; P, 126, 264. 43. Kant, CF, 304, 323, 327–328. 44. Kant, CT, 377–382, 387, 395–396. 45. Kant, CpR, 300–301; P, 218–219; Pascal 1954, 1113 (91). 46. Kant, CpR, 190–191; GMM, 39, 67–69: for Wert, Preis, and Würde, see Chapter 1.3 of this book. 47. B, sig. av; Kant, MM, 571; for the camel joke, see A 489; Chapter 6.2 of this book. 48. App. A. 9, 18, 26–27, 33; Ba, 18, 32–34, 44, 48–50, 62 (40, 80, 99, 198, 131); B, sig. aviiv; Pl. Phaedr. 246A–50C; cf. Orac. Chald. 67, 128, 217.6; Manetti 1975, 4:25; Kant, ObS, 833–834; Chapters 1.3 and 5.3 of this book. 49. Kant, A, 567–568, 648–6458; MM, 568–569, 625–626; RL, 846. 50. Kant, A, 625, 638–647, 665; Chapter 1.3 of this book. 51. Schiller 1793; 2005 has the German text and an En­glish translation; 2013 is an online version of the “Kallias-­Briefe,” translated in 2003; 1997b is the German text of “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,” translated in 1998. 52. Kant, CPR, 70; CJ, 117–134, 137–149, 207–222, 249–257; Guyer 2014, 1:421–458, is a recent summary of Kant’s aesthetics. 53. Kant, CJ, 165–207, esp. 178, 195; Shakespeare, King Lear, 3.2.3–11; Chapter 5.9 of this book. 54. Kant, CJ, 149–151, 283–286, 294–298; Schiller 2005, 205; Beiser 2008, 110–111.



Notes to Pages 253–263

563

55. Schiller 2003, 147–158; 2005, 174–177, 191–192, 204, 208–210, 215–216; 2013; Potts 2000, 103–112, 136–144, 268; Hammermeister 2002, 42–345; Beiser 2008, 68–75, 90–91, 95–96, 112–113, 117–118. 56. Schiller 1997b, 314, 344–347, 352–354, 358, 366–3673, 384; Hammermeister 2002, 45–61; Beiser 2008, 126–134, 139–144, 150–153. 57. Schiller 2005, 215; Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.2.149; Potts 2000, 104, 106.

8. Pico Reviled and Redeemed Hegel to Schelling, 1795, in Hegel 1952, 24. 1. Enfield 1791; Tennemann 1798–1819; Micheli 1995, 24–30, 55, 62–63, 117–120, 125–128; Kuehn 2001, 316, 343–351, 378–382. 2. Tennemann 1798–1819, 9:12–528, esp. 128, 155, 161–162; Micheli 1995, 56–57, 65, 85–86, 90–92, 116–117. 3. Tennemann 1798–1819, 9:146–154. 4. Ibid., 9:155–156. 5. Chapter 6.1 of this book. 6. Tennemann 1829 is the fifth German edition; see also an En­glish version in 1852, 2; Malusa 1977, 43–45; Micheli 1995, 58–62, 126, 131–132. 7. Tennemann 1829, 306–307; 1852, 258–260; Micheli 1995, 92–93. 8. Tiedemann 1791–1797; Buhle 1796–1804, 1800–1805; Meiners 1795–1797; Bianco et al. 1995, 11–13. 9. Tiedemann 1791–1797, 5:261–284, 327–329; Longo 1988, 813–819, 824, 829–835, 849–850. 10. Buhle 1796–1804, 6:159–187, esp. 159, 163, 187; 1800–1805, 2:381–401; Santinello 1988, 959–962, 974–976, 990–993. 11. Longo 1988, 722–729. 12. Meiners 1795–1797, 2:3–110, esp. 13, 16, 20–21, 34, 52–53, 76–77, 87, 104–105. 13. App. A.37; Ba, 70–72 (147–150); Meiners 1795–1797, 2;27–28, 75, 87; Chapter 5.3 of this book. 14. Meiners 1795–1797, 2:90, 104–110. 15. The En­glish quotations are from Hegel 1985, 184–189, based on the 1825– 1826 lectures; see also Hegel 1986b, 1:131–135, 3:468; Brown 1990, 1–2; Santinello 1995, 492–493. 16. Kant, EF. 17. Hegel 1986d, 85; 1975, 138; Taylor 1975, 380–403. 18. Hegel 1986d, 30; also 1975, 53–54, 197, for passages not in the Suhrkamp edition; Kaufmann 1978, 249–250; Pinkard 2000, 149–150. 19. Hegel 1986d, 487–490.

564

Notes to Pages 265–274

20. Hegel 1986b, 1:63–66, 3:11–12; Kant, EF; Kaufmann 1978, 276–279; also Pinkard 2000, 87, 263, on the willful obscurity of Hegel’s writing. 21. Hegel 1986b, 3:16–47. 22. Ibid., 3:13–14, 63–64, 68–69, 90–94; 1990, 73, 77, 119–120. 23. Hegel 1986a, 56–57; 1986b, 1:62–63, 321; 3:413–414; Ritter 1829–1834, 1841–1853; Kaufmann 1978, 230–232, 260–261; Longo 1995, 281–282, 290–292, 340–341, 290–303, 340–348; Santinello 1995, 492–493. 24. Zeller 1844; 1931; Longo 1995, 340–348; Beiser 2014, 24–25, 36–39; 2015, 257–260. 25. Ritter 1841–1853, 5:ix–­x v; Longo 1995, 327–329. 26. Ritter 1841–1853, 5:291–310, esp. 302–304. 27. Ibid., 5:291–310, esp. 292, 296–297, 310. 28. App. A.7–8; Ba, 12 (27–30); Ritter 1841–1853, 5:300–301. 29. App. A.6; Ba, 10 (19–23); Ritter 1841–1853, 5:297–298; Burckhardt 1860, 354; Chapter 2.2 of this book. 30. Ritter 1841–1853, 5:295, 98–301, 304, esp. 298, n. 1. 31. Zeller 1853; Sigwart 1855, iii–­iv; Dreydorff 1858, iii, 1; Beiser 2015, 257–265. 32. Sigwart 1855, 12–13, 21–26: Sigwart’s Logic was a point of reference for a Berlin dissertation on Pico in 1908 that challenged Brucker’s finding of confused syncretism; see Levy 1908, 12–14, 17; also Di Napoli 1965, 498–499. 33. Sigwart 1855, 16, 23–24, 73–78; McGrath 1987, 47–52; Stephens 1986, 9–17, 49–50, confirms that Zwingli read Pico, as shown by marginalia in books by Giovanni and Gianfrancesco, even though “­t here is almost no reference to them in Zwingli.” 34. Sigwart 1855, 17, 26–27, 78, 109, 232; Stephens 1986, 164–167; Reardon 1981, 98–102, 114–116. 35. App. A.6; Ba, 10 (22); Zwingli 1983, 224; Sigwart 1855, 59; Dreydorff 1858, 19, 25, 67; Usteri 1885–1886, 625–628; cf. Reinhardt 1989. 36. Dreydorff 1858, 8–10. 37. Ibid., 11, 22–24; Zeller 1931, 313–315; Gossman 2000, 298–301. 38. Dreydorff 1858, 12–66, esp. 12, 25–26, 32–33, 45–46. 39. Ibid., 26–45, esp. 32. 40. Ibid., 45. 41. Ibid., 13, 24–25, 46, 48, 52–58, 62–63, 67, 72–73. 42. App. A.6–7; Ba, 12 (27–30); Dreydorff 1858, 21, 25, 47–49, 55–57, 62–64, 70; Ritter 1841–1853, 5:300–301. 43. App. A.27; Ba, 50 (109); Dreydorff 1858, 61–67, 70. 44. Windelband 1878 is the modern part of the History; see also 1898, ix–­x, 348–377, esp. 354, from the fourth printing of the En­glish version of the Lehrbuch, first published in 1893; also Schopenhauer 1986.



Notes to Pages 275–287

565

45. Windelband 1898, 351, 354, 372–373. 46. Thilly 1914, 2, 229–233; 1957, v; Anon. 1934.

9. Pippa Passes Pico W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”

1. Beerbohm 1920, 9–51; 1946, iii. 2. Beerbohm 1920, 171–175. 3. Ibid., 180–205, and the plate opposite 238. 4. Hody 1742, 1–2: this first edition by Samuel Jebb is posthumous, following Hody’s death in 1707; Montor 1811, 2, 22, 32, 117–118; Paillot de Montabert 1812, 87–89; Seroux d’Agincourt 1823, 1:iii; Pugin 1841, 9, 51; Arnold 1869, 158–161; Culler 1985, 249–251; Fraser 1992, 230–232; Bullen 1994, 32–37; Stierle 1995; OED, s.v. ‘re­nais­sance’; Chapter 2.1 of this book. 5. Ten Hove 1797, 1:328–332; Clough 2012, 105–108; Van der Aa 1876–1878, 8:1353. 6. Roscoe 1795 is the first edition, actually published in 1796; 1846a, 23, 26–32, 169–170, 205–206, 244–245, 259–261, 329, 339, 530, 534, from the eighth edition in Bohn’s Standard Library; Anon. 1846, 26–32; Chandler 1953, 87–88; Hale 1954, 84–107; Bullen 1994, 40–50; Clough 2012, 98, 106, 109–113. 7. Greswell 1805, iii, x–xi, 161–162, 167–168, 241, 288, 325, 330, 336–367, 343, 355–356, 361–363; Pugliese 1973, 418–419; Sutton and Lawson 2004; Chapter 5.2 of this book. 8. Greswell 1805, 260, 288–290, 329, 331–332, 335, 344–350. 9. Ibid., 226, 238–260, esp. 245–247; Chapter 5.2 of this book. 10. Ibid., 245–251. 11. Ibid., v; Anon. 1824. 12. Rigg 1890, v–vi, xxxix–­x l; Seebohm 1867, 114–121; Turner and Murphy 2004–­; Chapter 7.1 of this book. 13. Symonds 1935, 3–9, 14–16, 333–336, 340–343, 351–353, 480–482; Schueller and Peters 1967, 44; Culler 1985, 251–252; Fraser 1992, 217–218, 243–244; Bullen 1994, 251–255; Harvey 2004–­; Norton 2004–­; Chapter 2.2 of this book. 14. Symonds 1935, 352, 480–484. 15. Pater 1980, 188–189, 410–413, 443–451; DeLaura 1969, 194–201; McGrath 1986, 78–80; Buckler 1987, 56–58; Bullen 1994, 273–298; Burrow 2000, 175– 178; on Pater, see also Chapter 1.3 of this book. 16. Pater 1980, 23–38, esp. 28–29, 33, 36; DeLaura 1969, 176–181, 232–237; Culler 1985, 246–247, 253–254; Buckler 1987, 70–72; Fraser 1992, 240–241; Chapter 1.3 of this book.

566

Notes to Pages 287–294

17. Pater 1980, 30–31, 38; W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” 18. Walpole 1764; Radcliff e 1794; Botting 1996, 21–90. 19. Roscoe 1846b, vii: this edition of the Life omits the “Advertisement” by Hazlitt found in 1883, vii–­v iii; Roscoe 1822, 24–36 and elsewhere replies to Sismondi 1809–1818 and defends Lorenzo; see also Bullen 1994, 50–58; Law 2012, 126–132. 20. Pugin 1836; cf. 1841, 9, 51; Stanton 1971, 79–124; Culler 1985, 157–159; Bullen 1994, 91–105. 21. Carlyle 1843, 84; Pater 1980, 280–285, 443–451; Fleishman 1971, 23–28, 37–77; Seiler 1980, 11–12; Shaw 1983, 70–82, 97–99; Culler 1985, 61–73; Kerr 1989, 1–17; Sutherland 1995, 69–108, 227–235, 262–264, 279–281. Pater’s first title in 1873 was Studies in the History of the Re­nais­sance, changed to ἀ e Re­nais­sance: Studies in Art and Poetry for the second edition of 1877. Two more British and two American editions followed in Pater’s lifetime: the total of copies printed was 8,000. In the year of publication, ­t here ­were at least thirteen reviews, mostly good, despite objections to the “hard, gem-­like flame” in Pater’s conclusion. 22. Culler 1985, 199–201; Fraser 1992, 169–178; Ryals 1993, 216–220; Bullen 1994, 183–207. 23. Browning 1997, 65–67; the first edition of Pippa Passes was the first pamphlet published in Browning 1841–1846; see also Bembo 1515; Nietz­ sche 1882, ¶108, 125; Korg 1983, 14–16, 38–47; Ryals 1993, 39–44, 56–64. 24. Browning 1997, 101–102, 147–150, 174–183, 240–246, 283–287; Ryals 1993, 70–75, 116–121. 25. Browning 1997, 149, 286; Korg 1983, 48–52; Fraser 1992, 168–178; Ryals 1993, 128–129; Bullen 1994, 191–192. 26. Browning 1997, 283, 286; Ruskin 1856, 377–379; Arnold 1869, 158–161; Nietz­sche 1882, ¶276; Korg 1983, 60–62; Culler 1985, 142–151, 160–170, 215–217; Hilton 1985, 186–202; Fraser 1992, 21–24, 37–38, 100–102, 245–246; Ryals 1993, 78–79; Bullen 1994, 125–132, 145–155, 183–189, 241–251; Burrow 2000, 21, 84. 27. Ruskin 1894, 24–27; Culler 1985, 163–165, 173–179; Wood 2005. 28. Lindsay 1847; Jameson 1848; Rio 1854; Korg 1983, 98–104; Culler 1985, 205– 214; Hilton 1985, 153–157; Fraser 1992, 43–133, esp. 62–69, 81–84, 97–105, 115–117; Ryals 1993, 75–77, 91–93; Bullen 1994, 80–90, 114–119; Barnes 1998, 8–21, 57–59; Prettejohn 2000, 17–38, 55–63; MacGregor 2004, 42; Conlin 2006, 214–234. 29. Eliot 1862–1863 is the first serialized edition; in 1994, an annotated edition, see 31, 42, 151–160, 176–181, 190–191, 222, 247–248, 289, 322; also Sanders 1978, 193–196; Shaw 1983, 106–109; Fraser 1992, 179–180, 186–188; Karl 1995, 333–334, 359–377.



Notes to Pages 294–304

567

30. Eliot 1994, 31, 35, 42, 160. 31. Ibid., 221–223. 32. B, sig. axir; Eliot 1994, 247–248; Vasoli 1964; Grafton 2000, 182–187. 33. Eliot 1994, 315, 321–322; fig. 13 appeared originally in Eliot 1862–1863, 153; Ross 1905, 113–114, 287; Gilbert 1949. 34. Bulwer-­Lytton 1830, 1:1; 1835; Robinson 1847; James 1857; Reade 1861; Trollope 1887, 1:283–285; Fleishman 1971, 31–36, 152–155; Sanders 1978, 20–30, 47–67; Fraser 1992, 189–205; Karl 1995, 74–75, 164–176, 197–202, 637–641, 650. 35. Starke 1802; Stendahl 1885, 379; Fraser 1992, 50–51; Bullen 1994, 109–115. 36. Anon. 1877, 313, 503; Black 1992, 338–365; Moody 2004, 270; Bruce 2010. 37. Anon. 1842, 270, 308, 406, 515, 531, 588–589; Hallam 1839, 1:163; on the original site of Pico’s burial, see Cini 2013; Roush 2015, 132–133, 212–213; Chapter 3.1 of this book. 38. Tytler 1819, 80–81, 188–196, 219; Ainsworth 1837; Anon. 1842, 269–270; Hallam 1839, 1:160–163; for another comparison with Crichton, see Roscoe 1846a, 22; also Fraser 1992, 50–52, 92–94; Burns 2016; Jack 2016. 39. Roeck 1991, 6–9, 45–60, 123–134; Fraser 1992, 225–235; Cavaliero 2005, 7–9, 37–45, 209–210; Siegmund 2006, 201–222; Goldberg 2011, 3–6, 26–35. 40. Anon. 1900, 221; Borsook 1981, 147–154, 164, 181–182; Artusi et al. 1996, 31–50, 59–94; Gabrielli 2007, 188–190, plates vi –­vi i. 41. https://­it​.­w ikipedia​.­org​/­w iki​/­Cappella​_­del​_ ­Miracolo​_­del​_ ­Sacramento. 42. Tietze-­Conrat 1945; Hope 1985, 325; Quermann 1998, 42–43, 96, 131–132; Cadogan 2001, 236–243; Gabrielli 2007, 53–54, 185: Pico was born on February 24, 1463, and died on November 17, 1494, at the age of thirty-­one; Chapter 1.1 of this book. 43. App. C.13.2The2; Concl. 41; Apol. 60, 103, 165; Fornaciari in Pico, 2010, xxvi–­lv; Borsook 1981, 180–182; Gabrielli 2007, 193. 44. Borsook 1981, 175–181, 194; Gabrielli 2007, 55, 185. 45. Vasari 1991, 1:441; Anon. 1900, 221; Burckhardt 1855, 803–804; 1873, 63–64; Borsook 1981 does not mention Pico; but see Hope 1985, 324–325, concluding—in disagreement with Cappi 1965—­that “no one in Rosselli’s painting looks much like Pico [as shown in the Niccolò Fiorentino medal]”; Gabrielli 2007, 192–193; Busi 2014, lxxxxix–­xci; also http://­w ww​.­picodellamirandola​.­it​/­. 46. Giovio 1577, 50–51; Sebregondi 1994, 256, 263, dates the medal to 1484– 1485, noting that the rest of the de­cade ­a fter 1484 is pos­si­ble. Wind 1967, 36–53, 66–69, reading the reverse of the medal as a message to Pico from Ficino that cannot have been sent ­a fter the autumn of 1486, makes it ­earlier, though not by much. The only documented dates belong to a dif­fer­ent medal, however, which was nearly identical on the reverse: the

568

Notes to Pages 307–314

obverse is a profile of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni, who was married in September 1486 and buried in October 1488. As Wind says, if the former date is a terminus a quo for Giovanna’s medal, Pico’s could still have been ­earlier. But his could also be ­later than 1486, perhaps assuming that Ficino was involved from the years when Pico’s trou­bles attracted the older man’s sympathies, as shown by his correspondence from that period: see Chapter 5.4 of this book. Wind derives the words on the reverse of Pico’s medal from a passage of Ficino’s Symposium commentary, which is plausible enough. But so is another grouping of amor, voluptas, and pulchritudo that Wind does not mention: Lucr. 4.1079–1104; cf. Cic. Tusc. 4.67–68. Oy-­Marra 1998, 45–48, noting the prominent nose and chubby face in some likenesses of the Phoenix, suggests that Gianfrancesco was idealizing his deceased relative. In fact, what he says—­considering the context—­seems restrained, calling his u ­ ncle’s appearance “striking and aristocratic” with “generally (in universum) attractive looks”: see B, sig. av. The medal shown ­here is held by the National Gallery in Washington, DC. See also Scalini 2001, 84; Copenhaver 2011, 170–171; Busi 2014, lxxx–­l xxxiii. 47. Giovio 1577, 51; Boissard and De Bry 1669, fig. Iii3; Sebregondi 1994, figs. 52–57, tav. x. 48. B, sig. a; Bann 1997, 239–241, 131; Lightbown 1989, 82–86; Sebregondi 1994; the Delaroche painting, 46 by 30 inches, is in the Musée des Beaux Arts of Nantes. 49. Villari 1859–1861, 1877–1882, 1888, 1892; Korg 1983, 84–85; Bullen 1994, 216–217; Smith 1994, 20–32, 78–79, 94, 102, 111–114, 178, 184–191, 226–231; Copenhaver and Copenhaver 2012, 53–65, 371–400. 50. Villari 1888, 1:74–76, 86–88, 134, 148–149, 167, 169, 244–245; 2:418; 1892, 1:145–146; Anon. 1910–1911.

10. Pico across the Seas and Back Anon. 1910–1911. 1. Garin 1937, 233: for Ricardo Bartoli’s progressive Pico, see Chapter 7.1 of this book and section 2 of this chapter. 2. Cassirer 1906–1907, 1:52–518; Gawronsky 1949, 31–33; Kristeller 1964, 54; Krois 1987, 15–17, 28–32; Ferrari 1996, 13–43; Raio 2002, 5–25, 187–190; Skidelsky 2008. 3. Cassirer 1906–1907, 1:147–161, esp. 147, 153–154. 4. Cassirer 1994, 10, 62–67, 87–92, 96, 115–116, 118–129, 155–161, 173–175, 178–179, esp. 10, 88–91, 118, from a facsimile of the first edition of 1927; Craven 1981, 24, 131, 154; section 3 of this chapter.



Notes to Pages 314–326

569

5. Concl. 109–110; Cassirer 1942, 123, 131, 331–334, 342; Craven 1981, 12. 6. App. A.59; Ba, 112 (226); App. C.17.2M15, 26; 19.2K13; Concl. 57–58, 62; Cassirer 1942, 319, 339, 344–345; cf. 1944, 103–104; 1994, 111–112; Craven 1981, 11–12, 22, 45; Copenhaver 2015a, 18, 46; Chapter 13.1 of this book. 7. Dulles 1941; Cassirer 1942, 123; 1955, 69–114; Lipton 1978, 4–7, 30–40, 70–80, 92–96, 101–102, 149; Krois 1987, 50–71, 74–75, 79–80, 104–109, 114, 128–129, 172–175; Friedman 2016. 8. Dulles 1941, xi–­x ii, 167–173; Carey 2010, 35–65; Kinzer 2013, 104. 9. Dulles 1941, xii, 4–5, 9–12, 23–25, 83–85, 97. 10. App. A.24–25; Ba, 42–44 (95–97); App. C.16.2Z7, 19.2K11; Concl. 55, 62; Ps. 116:15; Luke 2:13–14; 1John 5:19; Dulles 1941, 9–10, 15–16, 22–23, 73, 103–107, 121, 160–164. 11. Kant, GMM, 444; MM, 333–334; Dulles 1941, 4–5, 109, 118, 131–133, 167–170. 12. Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall 1948, v, 1–8, 15–19; Chapter 1.2 of this book. 13. Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall 1948, 215–219; Craven 1981, 27–28; Monfasani 2017, 101; on Pico’s rhe­toric in relation to his philosophy, see also Bausi 1996, Craven 2005, and Kraye 2008. 14. Kristeller 1964, 54–71; 1965. 15. Miller 1965, vii–­x vii; Greene 1999, viii–ix, 31, 78. 16. Kirk 1956a, 1956b; Birzer 2015, 104–110, 186–192, 358, 365–369; Batnitzsky 2016; http://­w ww​.­regnery​.­com​/­. 17. Kirk 1956a. 18. Pico 1995a, ix–­x; Travaglio 2006; Berlusconi 1991, vii–­v ii; https://­w ww​ .­abebooks​.­fr​/­servelet​/+ ­ BookDetailsPL%3Fbi​=­19565349207+%26searchurl​=­+ tn%253Dutopia%2526sortby%253D17%2526an%253Dthomas%252Bmore+ %252B&ie​=­UTF​-­8&oe​=­UTF​-­8. 19. Thorndike 1905, 27–35, 111; 1923–1958, 1:ix, 1–2, 977–979, 984; Kibre 1954; Walker 1958, 22, 54–59, 62–63, 91–92, 118–119. 20. Thorndike 1923–1958, 4:485–488, 494–511, 529–532; 5:4–5. 21. Ibid., 1:5–6, 973–975; Copenhaver 2015a, 19–24, 44–51. 22. Warburg 1932, 25, 39, 312, 327, 474, 476, 514, 643; 2000, 3; Cassirer 1994, 111, paraphrasing Warburg 1920, 24; Weber 1962, 139, 155, 350; Krois 1987, 22–23, 94; Ferrari 1996, 215–254; Hamlin and Krois 2004, xii–­x vii; Johnson 2012, 113; Copenhaver 2015b, xv–­x xi. 23. Warburg 1920, 5–6; Gombrich 1970, 16, 25–42, 88–98, 145, 195–205, 216–227, 254–259, 316; Roeck 1991; Copenhaver 2015a, 46–47. 24. Warburg 1920, 24, 70; Gombrich 1970, 25–37, 76–78, 88–89, 307–309; Copenhaver 2015a, 47–50. 25. Yates 1964, 116, 156, 432, 448; see also Yates 1965; and for Ricardo Bartoli’s anticipation of her views on Pico and science, see Chapter 7.1 of this book;

570

Notes to Pages 327–334

also Copenhaver 2002b, 312–320; 2015a, 19–22, 50–51, 89–91, 125–126, 157–159, 224–227; Hanegraaff 2012, 320–334. 26. Yates 1964, xi; 1966, xiv: In the preface to the Art of Memory, her next book ­a fter Bruno, she mentioned that Gertrude Bing, a close friend, “felt that the prob­lems of the ­mental image . . . ​in the history of the art of memory ­were close to t­ hose which preoccupied Aby Warburg, whom I only knew through her”—­which suggests that Warburg was more on Bing’s mind than hers. Bing, a close friend of Yates, was Cassirer’s student, Warburg’s librarian in Hamburg, and the London Institute’s third Director, a­ fter Fritz Saxl and Henri Frankfort: http://­warburg​.­sas​.­ac​.­u k​/­about​/­history​-­warburg​-­institute. 27. Yates 1964, 84–86, 90–91, 102–103, 106–108, 124, 138, 141, 323, 405, 422. 28. Ibid., 110–111, 129; Craven 1981, 113, 117–120; and Idel 2007a, 350, 374–379, on Yates’s misunderstanding of Pico’s blend of Kabbalah and magic—­ learned from Jews and meant to force them to become Christians—as original with him and as “tolerant and liberal.” 29. Yates 1968, 270–272; for Garin’s views on the Hermetica during this part of Yates’s ­career, see Garin 1969, 389–419; 1976a, 1976b, and 1977; also Copenhaver 1990; 1992, lviii–­lix; Jones 2008, 103–104, 136–138; Chapter 7.1 of this book. 30. Yates 1975, 1979; Copenhaver 1998, 2006. 31. App. A.1; Ba, 2 (2); Asclep. 5–6; Copenhaver 1992, 69–70, 219–221. 32. App. A.1, 18; Ba, 2, 32–34, 94 (2, 80, 199); C.H. 7.2; Asclep. 11–12; Copenhaver 1992, xxxix, l–­lvii, 102–103, 144–147, 152–153. 33. Copenhaver 2015a, 19–24; Scalini 2001, 84–85; Part III of this book. 34. Copenhaver 1992, xxiii, xxxii–­x xxix, lvii–­lviii; 2015a, 89–90, 157–159. 35. App. A.56–62; Ba, 104–116 (214–233); App. C.7, 17; Concl. 24, 56–58; Asclep. 23–24, 37–38; Copenhaver 1992, xxxviii–xl, 226, 237–241, 254–257; 2015a, 219–220; Craven 1981, 128. 36. Part III of this book. 37. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 1.1.51–164, 80–99, 108–112; 3.8–9; Yates 1979, 115–119; Jane Brown 1990, 182–183; Copenhaver 2007b. 38. Erlindo 1997, xxi–­x xii, xl–­x li; Craven 2005, 344; Chapters 3.4 and 7.1 of this book. 39. Craven 1981, 1, 11, 36–38, 66, 96–97, 113, 128; Craven 1986 is a summary by the author. 40. Condren 1982; Simonin 1982; Kristeller 1983; Valcke 1983; Bedouelle 1984; Miller 1984; Trinkaus 1984; Zika 1984; Allen 1997, 174, 185; Biondi 1997, 198; Garfagnini 1997b, 245; Sebastiano Gentile 1997, 466; Jacobelli 1997, 544–546. 41. Buck 1997, 7; Eco 1997, 28; Le Goff 1997, 30, 38–40: Buck may have been thinking about App. A.2 (Ba, 2–4 [3–5]), where the topic is not dignitas but praestantia and the usual claims about it are rejected.



Notes to Pages 334–342

571

42. Burckhardt 1860, 350, 354; Garin 1997c, xlviii, liv–­lv; also 1995c; Cassirer 1994, 90–91; Borghesi et al. 2012, 32; Chapter 2.2 of this book. 43. Garin 1985; Wirszubski 1967, 1969. 44. W, v–xi. 45. App. C.17.2M9; Concl. 57; Craven 1981, 3, 45, 59, 67, 96–98, 124–125. 46. W, 3–9, 88–93; Scholem 1946; Idel 2007a, of which 2011 is the En­glish version; Magid 2014. 47. Ba; Bn; Anon., Parchment; Allen 2008; Blum 2008, 50–60; Rabin 2008; Borghesi et al. 2012, 32–33.

11. Pico Orates Isa. 29:14, cited by Maimonides, Epist. to Yemen, 13. 1. App. A.64; Ba, 120 (238); Maimonides, Epist. to Yemen, 20; Hanegraaff 2012, 64–68. 2. App. C.1, 9, 20; Concl. 1, 28, 69–70; ISTC ip00639300 is a second edition, not a reprint, published around the same time, prob­ably in Ingolstadt, hence without Pico’s involvement. 3. App. A.39, 44–45, 71; Ba, 74 (155), 82 (173–176), 136 (266); App. B; App. C.19; Concl. 60. 4. Ba, 99 (206), with Bausi’s note; App. C.19.2K56; Concl. 67; Pico 1532, 151– 164; Exod. 14:19–21; Bahir, 166–168, 174–183; Fornaciari 1998, 115–117, suggests that Pico, while recognizing the significance of 72, might have used 71 in the heading in order to leave 72 invisible—­just as the Name is unutterable. 5. App. C.8.1K33, 19.2K63; Concl. 27, 68; Idel 1988a, 189; 1991, 26–42; Scholem 1996, 30–44; Busi 2014, 304–306. 6. App. C.8, 19; Concl. 24–25, 60; Idel 1991, 50–51; Lelli 1994, 219–221; Seeskin 2013; Fornaciari 1998, 107–108, 118–119, points out that Pico’s ­t heses about Kabbalah are more than 119 (47 + 72) if other propositions involving Kabbalah, explic­itly or other­w ise, are included: his count is 159. He also suggests that 47, like 72, might be a meaningful number as the sum of two divine names, one unspeakable (yhw h = 26), the other spoken (Ehyeh = 21), indicating that statements made by the 47 t­ heses still conceal secrets: see App. C.19.6; section 3 of this chapter and section 2 of Chapter 13. 7. Apol. 55; 2Cor. 3:6; Chapter 12.4 of this book. 8. App. C.19.2K1; Concl. 60–61; W, 3–15, 69–80, 84–88, 94–98, 106–119, 157–158; Wirszubski’s “Introduction” in Flavius Mithridates 1963, 11–76; Wirszubski 1967; 1969; the first seven chapters of Idel 2007a bring his many writings on Abulafia up to date; 2011 is the En­glish version; see also

572

Notes to Pages 343–348

Dell’Acqua and Münster 1965; Ruderman 1988, 405–407; Lelli 1994, 206– 207, 213–214, 219–222; 1997; 1998, 49–54; 2014b, 93–95; Raspanti in Pico 1997, 20–21; Idel 1998b; 2007a, 233–241; 2014, 21–23; Andreatta 2008, 2014, 75–79; Campanini 2008; Simonsohn 2008; Rudavsky 2015. Busi 2009, 169–170, 173, 176, argues convincingly that Pico worked with a team of Jews, perhaps including Abraham Farrisol—­and before 1486; ­others possibly involved in copying or supplying Hebrew and Aramaic books for Pico include Vitale da Pisa, Abraham de Balmes, Abraham Conat, and Abraham Sarafatti. 9. The autograph of the Latin version by Flavius of Abulafia’s Ve-­zot is in MS Vat. Ebr. 190, fols. 120 v–132v; the best of several Hebrew manuscripts is in JTS 1887; see also App. C.19.2K24; Concl. 63–64, commenting on Zohar III, 218b, with Isa. 53:5; W, 15–21, 109, 134–135, 184, 252–253, 286; Dell’Acqua 1965, 152, 156; Lelli 1994, 211–212; Idel 1998a, 58–60; 2000; 2007a, 50–51; 2014, 23–25; Campanini 2012, 50–51, points out that most of the writings of Eliezer of Worms translated for Pico w ­ ere finished too late to figure in the Conclusions or Oration; see also Corazzol 2012, 181–183, on Recanati, Flavius, and the Zohar. 10. Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fols. 120 v–121v; Gen. 28:10–17; 38; Deut. 3:26; Ps. 45:8; Ruth 4:12, 17–22; Lam. 3:49–60; b. Ber. 7a; Kibre 1966, nos. 282–285, 288, 290, 304, 306, 429, 468, 533–534, 538, 560, 695, 784, 790, 858, 865–866, 868, 871, 873, 880–882, 886, 891–893, 894–895, 898, 904–905, 947, 968, 978, 993, 1059, 1132; Idel 2014, 19–23, describes limitations on Pico’s knowledge of Kabbalah; see also Idel 1991, 47–48; Neusner 1988, xiii–­x v; Lelli 1994; Zatelli, Lelli, and Avanzinelli 1994; Raspanti in Pico 1997, 46–52; Tamani 1997. 11. Gen. 6:2, 31:42; Deut. 4:39, 32:29; Josh. 2:1; 1Kings 3:16; Isa. 3:12, 59:21; Ezek. 1:10; Mic. 5:7; Ps. 45:4, 104:25–26; SS 3:7–8; Job 40:20; Prov. 31:11, 14–16; Zohar III, 56b, 60; section 3 of this Chapter and section 2 of Chapter 12. 12. Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fols. 121r, 122r–123r, 125v. 13. Of the many works by Gershom Scholem and Moshe Idel on Kabbalah, places to start are Scholem 1946, 1987, 1991; Idel 1988a, and especially 2007a for the context in Pico’s Italy; also Dan 2006. 14. B, sigs. SSr, Ssiiv; Blau 1944, 21–2, 31; Breen 1952, 395–396, 399–400; Scholem 1974, 96–116; 1991, 41–45; Ruderman 1988, 398–401; sections 1 and 3 of this chapter. 15. Idel 2014, 26. 16. App. C.3, 5; Concl. 7, 14; Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fols. 120 v, 131; Maimonides, Guide, I, 3a–8b; II, 36b–37b, 80b–82a, 92a–997b; Scholem 1946, 135–138; Nardi 1958; Reines 1969–1970, 353–358; W, 153–160; Idel 1988b, 121–126, 185–195;



Notes to Pages 349–354

573

1991, 11–60; 2002a, 175–179; 2005a, 28–41, 86–92, 167–187; Davidson 1992, 6–43, 116–126, 282–313, 340–351; 2005, 283–284, 313, 369–377, 404, 411–414, 419–424, 539–541; Ivry 2005, 58–62; Pessin 2014, 5–7.1. 17. Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fol. 122v; Averroes 1550, fol. 64; 2009, 317, 328–329, 345; Elia del Medigo in John of Jandun 1551, fols. 135, 141–143; Dell’Acqua 1965; Ruderman 1988, 385–387; Idel 1991, 26–27; Bland 1982, 1991, 1995; Davidson 1992, 3–126, 209–232, 258–356; Coviello and Fornaciari 1992, xix–­x xiii; Lelli 1994, 206; Mahoney 1997; Goldfeld 1998. The continuation of T1Avr3, an unusually wordy thesis, attacks John of Jandun, one of Elia’s two main targets (Walter Burley was the other) in commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics that describe his association with Pico. 18. Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fol. 123v; Elia del Medigo in John of Jandun 1551, fol. 155; Scholem 1946, 205–207; Idel 1988a, 181–191; 2002b, 130–131; 2005b, 92–97, 112, 148, 214–221; 2007a, 140–141, 152–158. 19. App. C.8.1K4–5, 36; Concl. 25, 27; Gen. 1:28, 2:8–9, 3:1–6, 18:20–21; Gen. rab. 19:4; Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fols. 122r, 125v; Lib. rad. fol. 227r; Zohar I, 35–36, 187b; III, 239; Recanati, Comm. (1545), 19 v–20r, 23v, 51r; W, 24–25, 47, 134; Scholem (1991), 59–71. 20. App. C.19.2K1; Concl. 60–61; Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fols. 122r, 124r; Secr. fol. 209 v; W, 134–140, 149; Scholem 1954, 164; 1979, 41, in a slightly updated French version; Idel 1988c, 20, 31; 1991, 50; 2007a, 59, 140–141, 147–158. 21. App. A.34, 66; Ba, 66 (139), 124–126 (244–246); Exod. 38:29; Num. 11:16–17; 2Chron. 29:32; 1Esd. 3–4, 7 (Vulg.); 4Ezra 14:45–46 (Charlesworth, 1.555); Chapter 13.2 of this book; Ruderman 1988, 414–415; Idel 1997 analyzes diff erences between Kabbalah and its Christian version. 22. App. C.19.2K62, 65, 68; Concl. 68–69; Matt. 5:3–11; Deut. 6:4–9, 11:13–21; Num. 15:37–41; W, 144–145, 186–187; Scholem 1974, 216, 337–343; Allen 1994, 51, 66. 23. App. A.55; Ba, 102 (209, 212); App. C.8.1K19, 19.2K65; Concl. 26, 68; John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11; Gen. rab. 12:10; Axelrad, Cor., fol. 176r; Com. SI, fols. 1r, 23r; Ruderman 1988, 402–403; W, 36–37, 82, 259, where Wirszubski’s calculation of the gematria is dif­fer­ent, not counting the value of the final nun in Satan as reduced to 7 from 700, rather than 5 from 50; Idel 2012, 81–83. 24. App. C.14.2Pla1, 19.2K41; Pl. Tim. 35B; Plu. Proc. an. 1012D–­F, 1022C–­E , 1027D; W, 71, 74; Cornford 1957, 66–68; Allen 1994, 43–47, 62–75, 111–112; Copenhaver 1999, 51–60; Idel 2002a, 101; Dillon 2003, 223–224. 25. Pico to Benivieni, Nov. 12, 1486, in Dorez 1895, 358. 26. Comm. 1.8, 2.15, 4.3–4, 9; Allen 2008, 86–87. 27. Comm. 4.9. 28. Zohar I, 2b; Liebes 1993, 155–159, commenting on the Otiot de-­R. Akiva.

574

Notes to Pages 355–361

29. App. C.19.2K21; Concl. p. 63; Gen. 22:6; Isa. 63:1–3; Ps. 118:19; Gen. rab. 56:3; Eccles. rab. 9:6; Gikatilla, Port. fols. 6v–8r, 29; Abulafia, Secr. fols. 256v–257r; Flavius Mithridates (1963), pp. 114–115, with Wirszubski’s introduction, pp. 14–15; Martí (1787), p. 851; W, pp. 75–76, 110–113, 145, 163–164; Section 1 of this Chapter and Section 2 of Chapter 12. 30. Ficino 1959, 873–874; Starrabba 1878; Secret 1957; 1965, 169–174; Busi 2006b; Campanini 2008, 51–53; Simonsohn 2008; Corazzol 2012; Idel 2012, 81–83; Zeldes 2012; Busi 2014, lxxvi–­l xxix. 31. Gen. 25:29; Gen. rab. 63:11–12; Eleazar, An. fol. 144r, 157r, 269r; Abulafia, Secr. fol. 344v; Gikatilla, Port. fols. 64r, 69v; Lib. ord. gen. fol. 272; W, 15–17, 62, 69–73, 100, 114–115; Secret 1965, 175–181; Campanini 2008, 72–88. 32. App. A.16, 17, 31, 36; Ba, 28–30, 56, 68 (69, 73, 120, 142); see Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 35–84, for a dif­fer­ent analy­sis of the structure of the speech based on a theory about its stages of composition. 33. App. A.1; Ba, 1–2 (2); see also F, fol. 143r, with Bn, 141, where Abdala is a “prophet” and Arabic characters are used; Asclep. 5–6; Aug. Civ. 10.12. If Pico took the allusion to the Asclepius from Abdala, one candidate would be Abu-­el-­Wafa al-­Mubashir Ibn Fatik, whose collection of Hermetic maxims was read in Latin by Pico’s time: for his Liber philosophorum moralium antiquorum and other Arabic-­Hermetic wisdom lit­er­a­ture, see Van Bladel 2009, 184–196. While listing less likely possibilities, Bausi mentions Abdallah ibn Salam, a Jew who became a companion of the prophet and was known from the Machumetis Saracenorum principis doctrina translated by Herman of Dalmatia in the twelfth ­century. Piemontese 2012, ­a fter examining several pos­si­ble Abdalas, opts for Ibn al-­Tamir, a sixth-­century Christian from Yemen. Busi 2014, xxvii–­x xviii, suggests that the mystery about Abdala was deliberate on Pico’s part—­“ bad-­boy bravado.” Bausi’s superb edition and the excellent thematic study of Pico’s writings in Busi and Ebgi 2014 discuss more texts—­especially classical and Patristic writings, ­either as Pico’s sources or as background—­t han ­t hose mentioned in my notes. 34. App. A.5; Ba, 8–10 (17–18); Gen. 1:26–27 (Vulg.); cf. Plin. HN 35.88; Allen 1997, 175–177; Ebgi 2014, 208–209. 35. App. A.8, 64; Ba, 14, 118 (35, 236); Num. rab. 13:3; Zohar I, 2b–3a, 20a, 22b, 63a, 204a, 209, 250b; Section 1 of this Chapter. 36. App. A.59–60, 64; Ba, 112–116, 120 (226–230, 237); Prov. 1:6, 20; 6:6; 8:1, 12. 37. App. A.7, 22–23, 48, 69; Ba, 12, 40, 88, 132 (24–30, 93, 189, 260); Exod. 19:9, 20:18, 24:16; Anon. Proleg. in Plat. phil. 26.30–34 (Westerink et al.), with notes; Iamb. Protrep. 8.17–21, 35.14–22; Clem. Al. Strom. 1.28.176–179; ps.-­Dion. MT, 997A–1001A; Epist. 5, 1073A; Proc. Pl. theol. 1.2.10–11; Zohar I, 66a. For deification, see Russell 2004, 229, 312–320; Finlan and Kharmalov ­ uman, says 2006; also Greg. Nys. Contra Apoll. 201; 2Cor. 5:4. A deified h



Notes to Pages 362–365

575

Gregory of Nyssa, is like a drop of w ­ ater in God’s ocean, “transformed into the incorruptible sea, . . . ​taken up to be united with the divinity and to assume its properties.” Some con­temporary theologians still think that the less desirable alternative is an “autonomy and existential self-­sufficiency that imprisons us in our own inadequacies.” On perfect-­being theology, see Davies 2004, 1–9, and Murphy 2013; Busi 2014, xxxi–­x xxii, sees divinization as a positive achievement of Pico’s “anthropology”; likewise Dougherty 2008b, 142–146; and Torraciano 2018, 359–361; see also Ebgi 2014, 208–211, on self-­annihilation; De Pace 2002, 211–212, 245–247, 254; Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 49–51, on the curriculum; Siedentop 2014, 333–348 on individualism. 38. App. A.7, 9; Ba, 12, 18 (30, 40); Exod. 20:18 (Vulg.); ps.-­Dion. MT, 1001A; Zohar I, 66a; Ebgi 2014, 202–208. 39. App. A.8; Ba, 14–16 (31–37). 40. Lev. 11:30; b. Sanh. 108b; Zohar II, 80a. 41. Arist. EN, 1100a31–­b11; HA, 503a15–28; ps.-­Arist., Mir. auscult. 832b8–16; Plin. HN 8.120–122; 11.152, 188; 28.112–118; Plut. Vit. Alcib. 23; Adul. 53d4–6; Soll. 978E; Alciato 1534, sig. M7v; 1542, 190 88; cf. Busi 2006b, 167–169. 42. App. A.8, 18; Ba, 14, 32 (31–34, 78); Hom. Od. 4.384–423, 17.485–487; Pl. Charm. 155B; Euthyd. 288B–­C; Ion, 541E; Phaed. 118; Rep. 381C–­E , 82A–­C; Gell. 10.12.1; Orac. Chald. 144–147 (Des Places); Orph. Hymn. 25 (Klutstein, 75); Greg. Naz. Orat. 4.62; Proc. Comm. Rep. 109.11–114.29; Ficino 1959, 1825; TP, 10.1.6, 11.3.9; Alciato 1542, 248–249 (115); Erasmus 1558, cols. 69, 817–818, 1158 (1.1.93, 3.4.1, 4.9.111); Lewy 2011, 240–247; cf. Ebgi 2014, 287–292. 43. App. A.8; Ba, 14 (31–35); Koran 2:65, 171; 7:166, 176, 179; Emped. frg. 108 B117D; Pl. Phaedr. 249B; Diog. L. 8.14, 77; Chalc. Comm. Tim. 197; cf. Ogren 2009, 221–233; 2014, 121–123. 44. App. A.8; Ba, 14–16 (35–37), with Bn, 171–172; App. C.5, 19.2K10; Concl. 14, 62; Gen. 5:24; Tg. Ps.-­J. Gen. 5:24 (Etheridge, 175); 3Enoch 4:1–3 (Charlesworth, 258); Orph. hymn. 32, 1–5; Orac. Chald. 39.1, 49.2, 108.1, 109.1; C.H. 1.6, 9.8, 10.14; Proc. In Parm. 1084.24–36; Abulafia, Secr. fols. 341v–342r, 377r–378v; Scholem 1946, 67–70; 1987, 210–219; Stroumsa 1983, 278–279; W, 100–101, 193, 198–200, 231–234; Idel 1990; 2007b, 121–137, 278–282, 294–315, 509–510; 2014, 26–32; Fornaciari 1998, 112–113. In T2K10, a space to be filled by a Hebrew word is blank in the printed edition of the Conclusions; Ebgi 2014, 215–225, prefers Hokmah, S2, following a commentary by Francesco Zorzi; Wirszubski’s choice of Metatron seems better, however, ­because the Agent Intellect—­explic­itly identified with Metatron by another thesis that uses the name in Latin—is a better match for the other entities named in this thesis.

576

Notes to Pages 366–372

45. App. A.9; Ba, 16–18 (38–40); Hom. Il. 2.140; Od. 5.55–268; Asclep. 7; Plot. Enn. 1.6.6–8 (MacKenna, adapted); Ebgi 2014, 74–78, 103–113; Dougherty 2002, 232; cf. Gordon 2006, 53–56. 46. App. A.10; Ba, 18–20 (41–44); F, fol. 147r, with Bn, 171–173; Gen. 1:21, 6:12–13, 7.21, 9:11; Acts 2:17; Rom. 8:22; 1Pet. 2:13; Zohar I, 62b –65b; BDB, s.v. 5 ‫ ;בׂשר‬TDNTA, s.v. sarx; W, 241–242; Busi 2014, xxix; Ebgi 2014, 284– 285, sees “indeterminacy” and “instability” as a basis for “­human liberty.” 47. App. A.4, 9–10, 17, 26, 68; Ba, 6, 18–20, 30–32, 44, 128 (11, 40–42, 75–76, 99, 254); 1Kings 2:2 (Douay-­R heims); John 8:34; Rom. 6:23; Aug. Civ. 12.22; Hennessey 1989; Ebgi 2014, 347; Kristeller 1965, 53, while pointing out the timing of God’s promise, wrote that it was “wrong to dismiss the oration as mere oratory”; see also Section 2 of this Chapter. 48. App. A.11; Ba, 20–22 (45–50); Ps. 8:6, 48:21, 81:6; Expos. secr. punct. fol. 92v; Zohar III, 64b; W, 222; Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 40–41; Section 4 of this Chapter. 49. App. A.11–12; Ba, 22 (47–54), with Bn, 167–168; Pl. Phdr. 253B–­C; ps.-­Dion. CH, 164D–65C, 205B–­D; Still 2008, 193–195; Section 6 of Chapter 5 in this book. 50. Gen. 3:24; Exod. 25:18–22; 1Sam. 4:4; Ezek. 10:1–21; Ps. 18:11; Heb. 9:4–5; Rev. 4:2–8; DDDB, s.v. Cherubim; TDNTA, s.v. Cheroubin. 51. Num. 21:6; Deut. 8:15; Isa. 6:1–6, 14:29, 30:6; DDDB, s.v. Seraphim. 52. Col. 1:16; ps.-­Dion. CH, 200C–205D; DDDB, s.vv. Angel II, Thrones; TDNTA, s.v. thronos. 53. App. A.13; Ba, 22–26 (54–61); Ps. 122:5 (Vulg. 121; cf. θρόνοι in LXX); Greg. Magn., Hom. in Evang. 34.10 (MPL 76:1251C–52A); Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 47–48. 54. App. A.13, 15–16; Ba, 24–28 (55, 67, 71); App. C.8.1K2, 30; Concl. 25, 27; Axelrad, Cor. fol. 177r; W, 22–23. 55. App. C.8.1K1, 24; 19.2K67; Concl. 25–26, 68; Lev. 1:2; Job 25:2; Exod. rab. 18:5; Bahir, 11, 22, 59, 99, 108, 127–128, 132, 153–154, 177, 188; Recanati, Comm. fols. 3v, 4v, 127r, 129 v–130r, 131v; Expos. decem num., fol. 78v; Zohar II, 147, 154b, 231a; W, 21–22, 40–41, 158–159, 180, 230; Section 4 of this chapter. 56. App. A.13; Ba, 24 (60); App. C.8.1K37; Concl. 27; Gen. 1:2, 19:27; Ps. 18:11, 148:4; Job 38:7; Recanati, Comm. fol. 52v; Zohar I, 132b, 229b–230b; II, 21a, 46a, 129b; W, 47. 57. Exod. 19–20, 24:12–18; Aug. Trin. 10.1.3; ps.-­Dion. MT, 1000C–1001. 58. App. A.15; Ba, 26–28 (66–68); Rom. 8:5 (Vulg.); Philipp. 3:19 (Vulg.); cf. Plin. HN 17.38 for the physical sense of sapio; Pl. Tim. 24B–­D; Legg. 796B–­C; Orac. Chald. 72 (Des Places); Hymn. Orph. 32; Procl. In Crat.



Notes to Pages 374–380

577

94.17–95.22 171; In Tim. 1.141, 156–165; TP 5.35, 128 (Saff rey 128); Lewy 2011, 84, 95–96, 142, 481–485; Section 4 of this chapter. 59. App. A.58; Ba, 110 (224); Olympiod. Proleg. log. 9; Ficino 1580, sig. α5r; Saff rey 1968; Craven 1981, 105; Lamberton 1986, 90–133; Copenhaver 2019: the best guides to Ficino’s philosophical myths and poetic theologies are Michael Allen’s many works; Allen 1981 and 1984 are good places to start. 60. App. A.15; Ba, 26–28 (66–68); Di Napoli 1965, 400–416.

12. Pico Consults and Disputes Blake, Milton, 40.35–41. 1. App. A.16; Ba, 28 (69–70); App. C.19.2K8, 34; Concl. 61–62, 65; Acts 9:15, 17:34; 2Cor. 12:2–4; Philipp. 2:9–10; ps.-­Dion. DN, 681A–­B, 712A, 724B, 865B, 872A–­B; MT, 1000B, 1025B, 1032D–1033D; CH, 140D–141C; Abulafia, Secr. fol. 366; Gikatilla, Gates, 356–361; W, 102–106; Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 46–47. 2. App. A.16; Ba, 28 (69–72); Pl. Soph. 230C–­D; ps.-­Plut. Plac. 1.877A; Proc. TP, 1.2.10–11; ps.-­Dion. CH, 165B–­C, 208B–­D; EH, 504A–­B. 3. App. A.16; Ba, 28 (72); ps.-­Dion. CH, 140D–141A, 165D–168A, 209C–­D, 237B; EH, 372A–­B, 377B, 392B–­C, 404C, 425D–428A, 432B, 439C, 441B–­D, 473B–476A, 484D–485A, 504B–­C; DN, 588B, 592B; Epist. 1108A; Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 46–47. 4. App. A.17; Ba, 30–32 (73–76); Gen. 28:11–15; Ezek. 1:10, 26; Prov. 9:1; Tg. Ps.-­J. Gen. 28:12 (Etheridge 252); Pl. Phaed. 67B, cited by Plut., Isid. 352D; Cons. ad Apoll. 108D; Iamb. Protr. 65; and Proc. TP, 1.2.10–11; Gen. rab. 68:12; Maimonides, Guide, I, 19b–20b; Bahir, 169, 196; Zohar I, 19a, 82a; Klein-­Braslavy 2005, 256–258. 5. App. A.18; Ba, 32–34 (77–80); Ps. 9:16, 18:33–34 (17:34–35, Vulg.); Matt. 22:13; Pl. Rep. 439–441; Cic. Leg. 3.14; Asclep. 11–12; Aug. Enarr. in Ps., ad 9:15; Bahir, 211; Still 2008, 194–195. 6. Ezek. 1:10, 27–28; 8:2; Pl. Symp. 209E–210A, 211C; Iamb. Prot. 8; Maimonides, Guide, III, 11a; Zohar I, 31a, 80a, 129a; II, 30b; Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fols. 120v–121v; Idel 1988b, 109–116; Chryssagvis 2004, 41, 237; Ben-­Zaken 2011, 18–25, 46–49, 58–59, 73. 7. App. A.19; Ba, 34–36 (81–82); Orig. Cels. 6.21–22; Idel 2005a, 167–187. 8. App. A.19; 3.6.32, 19.59; Ba, 34 (82); Plut. Isid. 354A, F; 357F–358E; 360E–­F; 364E–­F; E apud Delph. 388E–389A; Macrob. Comm. 1.12.12; W, 164–165; Wind 1967, 132–137, 174–175; Idel 2005a, 186–189; Ebgi 2014, 25, 49–51; Ogren 2016, 44–51. 9. App. A.19–20; Ba, 36 (83); Maimonides, Guide, III, 45a; Wirszubski 1969, 183; Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 79–80.

578

Notes to Pages 380–386

10. Jer. 12:1; b. Ber. 2a, Sanh. 96a; Flavius and Pico, Job, fols. 22v–23r; Bahir, 231; Silver 1969, 24–25; Wirszubski 1969, 176–177, 182–188, 195–199; Andreatta 2014, 75–79. 11. Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fols. 120 v, 131v; b. Ber. 2a; Wirszubski 1969, 194. 12. App. A.20; Ba, 36 (83); App. C.8.1K24, 28; Concl. 26; Gen 1:2, 20–21; Jer. 1:5; Job 25:1–4, 31:18, 35:11; Dan. 7:10 (Vulg.); Flavius and Pico, Job, fol. 41r; Bahir, 127–128, 132, 177; Zohar I, 29b, 34; II, 147, 231a; Recanati, Comm. fols. 4v, 11v–12r; W, 40–41; Wirszubski 1969, 191–196; Ebgi 2014, 88–90; Chapter 11.5 of this book. 13. App. A.20; Ba, 36–38 (84–86); Flavius and Pico, Job, fol. 38v; Emped. frg. 8(17), 107(115); Plut. Isid. 369B–371A; Wirszubski 1969, 189–190. 14. App. A.20–22; Ba, 36–40 (83–92); 2Cor. 4:16 (Vulg.); Cic. Tusc. 4.50; Lucr. 5.24–27; Verg. A 8.641; Luc. 1.1–4; Ov. Met. 9.192–197. 15. App. A.8; Ba, 14 (31–35); App. C.8.1K41; Concl. 27; Gen. 11:27–32, 38:8; Isa. 43:5; Job 25:4, 31:1, 33:27–30; Eccles. 1:4 (Vulg.); Emped. frg. 108 (B117D); Bahir, 185–186, 200–201, 221–223, 231–232; Zohar I, 48a, 131a, 186b–188a, 239a; II, 75a, 99b; III, 7a, 88b, 182b; Scholem 1991, 197–228, 304, citing Ra’aya Mehemnah III, 216b; ZLTG, 3.1362–1363; W, 49–56; Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 55; Ogren 2009, 15–17, 147–149; Chapter 11.4 of this book. 16. App. A.8, 22–25; Ba, 14–16, 38–44; (35, 89–97); Ps. 55:7; Matt. 11:28; John 14:27; Hom. Il. 18.107, cited by Plut. Isid. 370C–­D; Heracl. frg. 53; Pl. Phaedr. 249C; Iamb. Vit. Pyth. 33.229, 240; Chapter 11.4 of this book. 17. Ibn Tufayl 2005, 146–147; Maimonides, Guide, I, 93a, 122a; Novak 1982, 127– 128; Bacchelli 1993; Sells 1999, 92–95, 108–1011; Ben-­Zaken 2011, 65–66, 71–76, 88–89; Ivry 2016, 44, 74, 80, 255. Contrary to Scholem 1971, 203–227, Idel 1999, 33–42, concludes that “self-­annihilation” and other “extreme formulations of unio mystica are not only pos­si­ble in Judaism but [are] also . . . ​an integral part of the most widespread form of Jewish mysticism, the mystical theology of Chabad”; see also Scholem 1946, 119–123; and Knox 1994, 164: “the supreme crux of mysticism [is] ­whether the contemplative becomes wholly and literally identified with the object of his contemplation.” 18. App. A.25; Ba, 42–44 (96–97); Ps. 24:3–10 (23 Vulg.); 45:11–15 (44 Vulg.); 116:15 (115:6 Vulg.); Prov. 7:4, 24:3; b. B. Bat. 17a; Deut. rab. 11; Bahir, 148– 150; Zohar I, 2a, 168a; II, 124b, 146; Recanati, Comm. fols. 77v–78v; Scholem 1987, 162–180; 1991, 141–147, 159–182; W, 35, 153–157, 252–253. 19. App. A.25; Ba, 44 (97); App. C.8.1K9–10, 17; Concl. 25–26; Deut. 22:22; Ps. 29:5; 1Chron. 29:11 (1Par. Vulg.); Zohar I, 3b, 31b, 60b; III, 74a; Recanati, Comm. fols. 14v, 17v–18r, 212r; Lib. rad., fol. 261r; Comm. Sef., fol. 30r; W, 29–30, 35. 20. App. A.25; Ba, 42 (96); Ps. 24:8–10; Matt. 8:8; Rashi 1997; Bernard of Clairvaux, Serm. in Cant.; Miss. rom., Ordo miss. 132; Japhet 2007.



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579

21. App. A.25; Ba, 42–44 (96); Lev. 16:3; Deut. 32:29; Isa. 6:3; Ezek. 3:12; Zohar I, 25a; III, 60b–61a. 22. App. A.5; Ba, 8 (17); Scholem 1991, 171–182. 23. App. A.25; Ba, 44 (97); App. C.19.2K11, 13; Concl. 62; Ps. 24, 116:15; SS 1:2; Pl. Phaed. 64A, 67D–­E , 80E; Cic. Tusc. 1.74; Plot. Enn. 1.6.6–9 (MacKenna adapted); Macrob. Comm. 1.13.5; Maimonides, Guide, III, 129; Bahir, 236– 238 (with additional material from CVE 191, fol. 332r, cited in W, 159); Zohar II, 124b, 146, 195b–196a, III, 101b, 260b; Recanati, Comm. fols. 77v–78v; Gersonides, SS, 117, 122–123; W, 154–160, 252–253; Scholem 1974, 385–388; Novak 1982, 138–145; Andreatta 2014, 85–88; Kalligas 2014, 205–219; Busi 2014, 61, 67–72, citing Abulafia, Secr. fol. 468v; Ebgi 2014, 122–123. 24. Pl. Gorg. 493A; Phaed. 64A, 81A–­B; Phaedr. 250C; Rep. 515C–517C; ἀ eat. 173D–174A, 176A–­B; ps.-­Dion. EH 437A. 25. App. A.26; Ba, 44 (98); ps.-­Dion. MT 1000–1001A; Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fol. 129r. 26. Deut. 34:4; b. Rosh hash. 21b; Zohar I, 3b; II, 79b, 140b, 221a; Abulafia, Lib. red. fol. 285r; W, 245–251; ZLTG, 3.867–868. 27. App. A.26; Ba, 44–48 (98–102); App. C.16.Z8–9; Concl. 55; Gen. 3:21; Exod. 25:1–31:17, esp. 25:5, 26:14; Job 10:11; Plut. E apud Delph. 393B–­C; Orac. Chald. 120, 129 (Des Places), with Klutsein 1987, 116–118; Procl. El. 209; Zohar I, 36b, 73b, 223a; II, 76a, 179a; Still 2008, 196–197; Lewy 2011, 214, 276–277, 359, 416–417; Ebgi 2014, 349–352. 28. App. A.26–28; Ba, 46–50 (101–112); 1John 5:19; Pl. Phaedr. 249C–250C; Symp. 209E–210A; Plut. Isid. 382C–­E; Proc. TP 4.9.30, 26.77–27.78; Ebgi 2014, 8–11. 29. App. A.27–28; Ba, 48–50 (103–112); App. C.16.2Z6, 18.2Or24, 19.2K17; Concl. 55, 60, 63; Ps. 36:8; Rom. 1:20; Ficino 1959, 1399; TP 4.1.28; W, 186, 192; Wind 1967, 276–281. 30. App. A.28; Ba, 52 (112); Deut. 32:32; Jer. 2:21; Orac. Chald. 97 (Des Places), with Klutstein 1987, 19, 117, lines 19–21; Hymn. Orph. 30; 34.6–7, 44–48, 50, 52, and esp. 54; Zohar I, 36b, 73, 76a, cf. 238; Lib. rad. fol. 243r; W, 192; Wind 1967, 277; Busi 2014, 374–377. 31. App. A.28–30; Ba, 50–56 (110–119); John 1:9; Rom. 1:20; Pl. Symp. 202E–206E; Rep. 363C–­D; Plut. E apud Delph. 387B–­C, citing Hom. Il. 1.70, 3.277, also 385B, 388E–­F, 389A–­B; Plut. Pyth. Orac. 396C–­D; Proc. In Tim. 3.2.197–198; Serv. A 6.78; Macrob. Sat. 1.18.1; Boet. Cons. 5.m2; Gen. rab. 1:11; Ebgi 2014, 41–43, 53–59, 180–182. 32. App. A.30; Ba, 54–56 (114–119); Plut. E apud Delph. 385B–­F, 387E–­F, 388C–89D, 391C–­D, 392A, 393A–­D, 394A–­C; Isid. 381F; Pyth. Orac. 408E; Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 58–60; Ebgi 2014, 43–45: ia, the equivalent in Homeric Greek of the feminine singular mia or ‘one,’ is also a ‘cry’ or ‘shout.’

580

Notes to Pages 393–400

33. App. A.30; Ba, 56 (118–119); Pl. Alcib. I, 121B–122A, 131A–133C; Charm. 164D–165A; Protag. 343A–­B. 34. App. A.30; Ba, 54–56 (116–119); Plut. E apud Delph. 392A, 393B–­C, 394C. 35. App. A.27, 29; Ba, 50–54 (109–113); Pl. Phdr. 244A–245C, 246C–­D, 247E, 249C–251B, 265B; Verg. A 4.259; Ov. Fast. 5.663–666; Plot. Enn. 1.6.5–7 (MacKenna adapted); Ficino 1959, 128; Allen 1993, 144–145; Kalligas 2014, 203–211. 36. App. A.29, 32; Ba, 52–54, 60–62 (113, 129); Job 38:7, 36, 39 (Vulg.); Prov. 30:30–31 (Vulg.); Matt. 26:69–75; Pl. Phaed. 118A; Iamb. Protr. 21.107 (# 17), 116; Vita Pyth. 28.147; Proc. De sacr. 149–150; Syn. Dion, 7–9, citing Arist. frg. 15 (Rose); Bori and Marchignoli 2000, 60; Ebgi 2014, 119–123; Copenhaver 2015a, 92–93; Chapter 11.4 of this book. 37. Cic. Tusc. 5.8–10; Plut. Lib. educ. 12D–­F; Porph. Vita Pyth. 12, 37–44; Iamb. Myst. 96.13–97.9; Protr. 21.107 (#6, 12, 26); Vita Pyth. 18.81–82, 29.163; Serv. A 10.564; Burkert 1972, 166–168, 173–179, 199; Kahn 2001, 8–11, 75; Copenhaver 2015a, 77, 82–83. 38. App. A.24, 31–32; Ba, 42, 56–60 (94–95, 120–124); Iamb. Protr. 21.107–108 (#15, 17, 18, 27), 115–117, 121–122; Ebgi 2014, 117–119. 39. App. A.32; Ba, 60–62 (124–129); Job 38:7, 36, 39 (Vulg.); Prov. 30:30–31 (Vulg.); Matt. 26:69–75; b. Ber. 60b; Lev. rab. 25:5; Pl. Phaed. 118A; Phaedr. 247E; Lucr. 4.712–717; Plin. HN 8.52, 10.47; Plot. Enn. 1.6.8; Porph. Vita Plot. 2; Procl. TP 4.46–47; De sacr. 149–150; Ebgi 2014, 14; Chapter 11.4 of this book. 40. App. A.27, 68; Ba, 48–50, 128 (108, 253–254); App. C.5; Concl. 14–15; 2Cor. 12:2–4; Pl. Phaed. 64A, 67D–­E , 80E; ἀe aet. 176A–­D; Plot. Enn. 1.6.6–9; Porph. Sent. 8–9; Smith 1974, 20–39; McGinn 1999, 1:243–262; sections 1–3 of this chapter. 41. App. A.33; Ba, 62–64 (130–134), with F, fol. 152v, and Bn, 173–174; App. C.8.1K11; Concl. 25; Apol. 57; Gen. 2:10–14 (Vulg.); SS 6:11; Orac. Chald. 67, 128, 217.6 (Des Places), with Klutstein 1987, 19, 117, lines 30–31, and Lewy 2011, 31–33, 149, 171–172; b. Hag. 14b; Lev. rab. 13:5; SS rab. 1:27; Zohar I, 26a, 85a, 208a; III, 290b; Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fols. 125v–126v; Scholem 1987, 281– 283; 1996, 50–65; W, 30–31, 241–242, for his reconstruction from F of the names of the four rivers; also Novak 1982, 136–137; Ebgi 2014, 264–265; Chapter 11.1 of this book. 42. Zohar I, 18b, 26b–27a, 46b; II, 15b, 98b; III, 118b, 290b; Recanati, Comm. 18v; W, 30–31; Ebgi 2014, 260–263. 43. App. A.34; Ba, 64–66 (135–139); Ps. 55:18 (54 Vulg.); Aug. De Gen. ad litt. 4.46–47; cf. Enarr. in Ps. 54:18; Ebgi 2014, 332–335. 44. App. A.34; Ba, 64–66 (135–139); App. C.8.1K14, 19.2K37, 42; b. B. Bat. 25a; Pirqe R. El. 3; Zohar I, 18b, 34b, 79b–85a, 96a, 111a, 112b, 119b.



Notes to Pages 400–411

581

45. App. A.34; Ba, 64–66 (135–139); Gen. 12:4–9, 28:10; Allen 1998, 38–41; Section 2 of this chapter. 46. Gen. 12:4–9, with Rashi; Zohar I, 83a; Recanati, Comm. fol. 44r; Gikatilla, Port. fols. 121v–122r; W, 32–33; Scholem 1991, 204. 47. App. C.19.2K37, 39, 42; Concl. 65–66; John 8:24, 56–58; W, 138, 167–168, 184; Section 2 of this chapter. 48. App. A.35; Ba, 66–68 (140–141); Jer. 9:20 (21 Vulg.); Tob. 2:11–13, 3:8, 6:1–9, 8:2; 2Cor. 4:16; Hier. Ep. 76.2; cf. Aug. Serm. 128 (MPL 39:1265); Zohar I, 138a (MhN); II, 153a; ZLTG, 1.296–297; DDDB, s.vv. Gabriel, Raphael. 49. App. A.34–35; Ba, 64–68 (135–141); App. C.8.1K1; Concl. 25; Koran 2:124–127, 3:96–97, 14:35, 22:26, 26:92–95; Recanati, Comm. fol. 131v; W, 21–22, 158–159, 230; Section 2 of this chapter and Section 5 of Chapter 11. 50. App. A.36, 41, 44–45; Ba, 68, 76, 80–82 (142, 158, 172, 176); Cic. Fin. 1.1; Hor. Carm. 1.7.5, 3.3.23; Propert. 3.20.7; Craven 1981, 44–45; Edelheit 2008, 361–362. 51. App. C.20; Concl. 70; Fornaciari in Pico 2010a, ix–xi, xiv–­x v; Section 3 of Chapter 11: Silber l­ ater printed one of the harshest attacks on Pico to come out of the papal inquest: see Garsias 1489. 52. App. A.56–57; Ba, 104–108 (214–222); App. C.17.2M9; Concl. 57; Apol. 47–48, 54–55; Institoris and Sprenger 2009, 8–9, 69–74. 53. App. A.1, 36–37, 39, 42; Ba, 2, 70–72, 74 (1, 145, 147–148, 154, with Bn at ¶1); Job 32:8–9; 1Tim. 4:12–14; Apul. Apol. 1.3, 17–18; Dig. 50.13.1.1–6; Zohar II, 166. 54. App. A.37, 43; Ba, 72, 80 (149, 166); B, sigs. aiiir, aviir; Ebgi 2014, 330; Bacchelli 2015; Chapters 5.2 and 5.4 of this book. 55. App. A.41; Ba, 76–78 (158–162); App. C.1; Concl. 1; B, sig. avi; Lawn 1993, 6–17; Weijers 2002, 52–58, 256–260; Hamesse 2006, 30–48. 56. App. C.13.1, 2, 10; Jones and Penny 1983, 49–67; Lawn 1993, 85–93; Weijers 2002, 19–24, 189–191; Porro 2014; Spade 2014. 57. App. A.41; Ba, 76–78 (158–162), with Bn, 172; Ps. 2:9–10; Prov. 27:17; Eccles. 10:10; Arist. Prob. 916b19–24; Verg. A 8.435; Firm. Mat. Math. 3.7.1–2, 6.5.4; b. Ta’an. 7a; Ebgi 2014, 244–245. 58. App. A.21, 44–45; Ba, 38, 80–82 (88, 171–176); B, sig. avir; Cic. De orat. 3.129. 59. App. A.40, 46–47; Ba, 74, 84–86 (156, 179–186, with Bn, 98); App. C.1; Concl. 1; Cic. Post red. 10; Hor. Epist. 1.1.14–15; Quint. Inst. 1.8.19, 5.7.7; Vit. Arist. 5.1–2 (Dühring); Chapter 6.1 of this book. 60. App. C.15; Concl. 1, 3, 9–11, 30, 51–54; B, sig. aviv; Breen 1952, 384–426, esp. 403; Dionisotti 1955; Garin 1960; Corsano 1965; Schmitt 1976, 62–65; Valcke 1985, 47–50; Jardine 1988, 173–178; Lohr 1988, 591–594; Lawn

582

Notes to Pages 413–419

1993, 45–63; Panizza 1999; Grendler 2002, 257–260; Marenbon 2007, 311– 315; Vasoli 2007, 41–53. 61. App. A.30, 47; Ba, 54, 86–88 (186–187); App. B; App. C.1–3, 5; Concl. 1, 6–7, 12, 14–15; B, sig. av r; Apol. 11–32, 109–110; Giles of Rome, Quodl. 1.10, from Pini 2006, 249, 261; Caroti 2005, 62–74, 80, 83–84, 90–92; Iribarren 2011; Lambertini 2011; Porro 2014; Copenhaver 2015a, 102–126; 2015b, 259–346; 2019. 62. App. C.9, 17.2M9, 19.2K1, 2, 28, 48, 68; Concl. 28, 57, 60–61, 64, 66, 69; Apol. 110–111; cf. B, sigs. aiiv, avi; Caroti 2005, 63–64; Terracciano 2012, 87–93, on Origen; Section 4 of this chapter. Pico used the same preposition, secundum, to mean ‘regarding’ or ‘relating to’ when classifying the T1 ­t heses but ‘following’ or ‘according to’ for the T2 ­t heses: the distinction is obvious in context. A thesis on Averroes (T1Avr3), for example, mentions John of Jandun, who was born nearly a ­century ­a fter Averroes died. 63. App. A.47; Ba, 54, 86–88 (186–188); Cic. De orat. 3.28. 64. App. A.48; Ba, 42, 58, 88, 106–108, 120, 132–134 (122–123, 189, 221–222, 239, 260–262); App. B; App. C.6–7; Concl. 22–25, 28, 44, 47, 50, 54, 58; Dodds in Proclus 1963, 220–223, 234–237, 252–254; Chapter 13.2 of this book. 65. App. A.46, 49–50; Ba, 84, 90 (180, 191–192, with Bn, 151); F, fol. 158r; Acts 5:17, 15:5, 24:5, 26:5, 28:22; Pl. Epist. 7.341; Cic. Par. 2; Sen. Epist. 33.10–11; Diog. L. 1.19–20; Lact. Inst. 4.30; Iamb. Vit. pyth. 34.241. 66. App. A.50; Ba, 90–92 (192–195); Diog. L. 1.1–11; cf. Euseb. PE 10.3.26; Aug. Conf. 7.26, 8.3; De vera rel. 3.3; Civ. 8.12, 9.1; Chapter 6.1 of this book. 67. App. A.50–52; Ba, 92–96 (196–199); B, sig. aiir; Pl. Symp. 208E–209C; Lucr. 2.1146–1152; Sen. Epist. 33.7, 94.15; Val. Max. 2.1.4–5; C.H. 2.17; 12.2, 11, 13–15, 18–19, 21; 13.6–7, 12; Serv. G 2.51; Dig. 19.2.15.4. 68. App. A.46, 53; Ba, 84–86, 96–98 (183, 200–205); App. C.10; Concl. 28; B, sigs. aiv v–­v; Aug. Acad. 3.19.42; Simpl. In Arist. cat. 8.7.23–32 (Kalbfleisch); Vit. Arist. 8–9 (Dühring); Boet. Comm. 2 de interp. 2.79–80 (MPL 433B–434B); Dougherty 2002, 235–236; Section 5 of this chapter. 69. App. A.54–56; Ba, 98–102 (206–208, 214); App. B; B, sig. aiir; Chapter 11.1 of this book. 70. App. A.55; Ba, 100–102 (208–212); App. C.14.2Pla1; 3.15; Concl. 44, 52–54; Pl. Rep. 525; Epin. 976D–978C; Arist. Prob. 956a11–14; Iamb. Vita pyth. 28.146–148, 29.162; Procl. ἀ eol. Plat. 1.25–26; Chapter 11.2 of this book. 71. App. A.55; Ba, (211–213); Van Bladel 2009, 147–157; Pingree 2011; Chapter 11.3 of this book. 72. App. A.54; Ba, 98–100 (206–207); Concl. 30, 36, 41; App. B; Pico 1532, 112– 121; Chapter 11.1 of this book.



Notes to Pages 421–428

583

13. Pico Defends Magic and Kabbalah Plot. Enn. 4.4.40. 1. App. A.56–57, 62; B, 104–106, 116 (214–217, 233); App. C.17; Concl. 56–57; Plot. Enn. 4.4.40; Porph. Abst. 4.16.1; Schol. in proleg. Hermog. 14.284 (Rabe); Suda, Γ 365; Aug. Civ. 10.9; Copenhaver 2015a, 25–34, 62–63; 2015b, 71–89, 211–218, 237–243, 372–374. 2. App. A.59; Ba, 112 (226); Copenhaver 2015a, 114–115, 122–126, 247–248, 259–271; 2015b, 368–374, 382–386, 400–409; Chapter 11.4–5 of this book. 3. App. A.8, 35; Ba, 14–16, 66–68 (35, 140–141); App. C.17; Concl. 56–58; Abulafia, Secr. fols. 341v–342r, 377r–378v; W, 187–195; Fornaciari 1998, 113– 114; Ebgi 2014, 91–102. 4. App. A.57–58; Ba, 106–112 (217–226); App. C.14.2Pla45; Concl. 48; Apol. 49; Pl. Phaed. 113D; Phaedr. 247B; Tim. 41E, 44E, 69C; Plin. HN 30.1, 3–4, 8–9; Apul. Apol. 25; Orac. Chald. 120, 201 (Des Places); Procl. In Parm. 2.768–769, 3.820–822; In Tim. 3.1.81.13–29, 2.144.24–146.21; Al-­K indi 1974; William of Auvergne 1674b, 45, 69–70; 1674c, 159–165; Roger Bacon 1618; Molland 1974; Toussaint 2007, 113–122; Idel 2007a, 224– 225; Copenhaver 2015a, 102–126, 254–257, 278–291; 2015b, 143–149, 296–297. 5. App. A.57–58; Ba, 108 (222–223); Pl. Alcib. I, 121E–122A; Charm. 156D–157B, 158B; Plin. HN 30.6, 8; Iamb. Vita pyth. 19.90–94, 28.135–138, 30.173. 6. App. A.57–58; Ba, 110 (224); Isa. 29:14; Hom. Od. 13.102–112; Porph. De antr. 31; Ps.-­Dion. CH 2.1, 177B; Chapter 11.1 of this book. 7. Plot. Enn. 4.4.40–45 (McKenna); Copenhaver 2015a, 55–68; 2015b, 174–177. 8. App. A.59; Ba, 112 (226); Porph. Vita Plot. 10. 9. App. A.60; Ba, 112–114 (228–229); Plot. Enn. 4.4.40–45, esp. 40.9–19. 10. App. A.60; Ba, 1114–1116 (230); App. C.17.2M13; Concl. 57; Verg. G 1.2, 2.221; Hor. Epod. 2.9–10; Ov. Met. 14.623–697; Apul. Apol. 40; Orac. Chald. 77, 206, 223 (Des Places), with Klutstein 1987, 118; Procl. De sacr. 148–149; Syn. Insomn. 2, 8, 14; Calv. encom. 6; Psell. Comm. in Orac. 1133a; Tobit 3:8, 24; 5:5–7; 6:1–20, 8:1–3, 12:15; Ebgi 2014, 150–158; Copenhaver 2015b, 36–38, 143–149, 205–206. 11. Plot. Enn. 4.4.44; Smith 1974, 83–99; Copenhaver 2015a, 76–79. 12. App. C.19.2K13; Concl. 62; Plot. Enn. 4.4.40; Iamb. Myst. 70.18–71.18, 72.12–17, 82.9–15, 88.5–9, 176.13–177.12, 196.13–197.11, 227.1–228.12, 229.17–230.6, 231.5–232.9; W, 158–160; Scholem 1946, 49–54; Copenhaver 2015a, 76–79; 2015b, 190–202. 13. App. A.61; Ba, 116 (231–232); App. C.17.2M9; Concl. 57; Idel 2014, 41–42. 14. App. C.17.2M6–9; Concl. 56–57; Fornaciari 1998, 113.

584

Notes to Pages 428–434

15. App. C.17.2M4, 6–9; Concl. 56–57; Apol. 48; Edelheit 2008, 329–331; Chapter 12.5 of this book. 16. App. A.61; Ba, 116 (231–232); App. C.17.2M15, 26; Concl. 57–58; Isa. 6:3, as in Miss. rom., Ordo miss. 31; Rev. 4:8; Ps.-­Dion. CH 209D, 212A–­B; Idel 2007a, 374–379. 17. App. A.62–63; Ba, 116–118 (233–235); Institoris and Sprenger 1992, fol. Iv; 2009, 71; Copenhaver 2015b, 339–346. 18. App. A.68; Ba, 128 (253); App. C.19; Concl. 60; B, sig. aiiiir; Idel 2007a, 374–379. 19. App. A.63, 68; Ba, 118, 128 (234, 254). 20. App. C.8.T1K6, 7, 9, 16, 40; 19.T2K29, 36, 47, 48, 53, 57, 58, 62, 68, 69; Concl. 24–28, 60–69; W, 25–30, 34–35, 144–146, 178–179, 186–189, 216, 237–238. 21. App. A.55, 66–67, 69, 71; Ba, 102, 124–126, 134–136 (209–211, 246–247, 266); W, 132. 22. App. C.17.2Or4, 5, 12, 21; 19.2K10, 17; Concl. 58–60, 62–63; Apol. 52; Ps. 36:9 (Vulg. 35); W, 147–148, 186–187, 191–200; Wind 1967, 276–280; Corazzol 2008, 140–157; and Scholem 1991, 156–157, on Jewish concerns about treating the Shekinah as part of a divine Trinity. Farmer 1998, 504– 507, despite the context established for T2Or5 by Or4 and then confirmed by Or21, finds “no evidence” that Or5 is about Kabbalah and denies that the “threefold God” is the Christian Trinity—­remarkable, considering (a) Pico’s statement that the Hymns are in­eff ec­t ive without Kabbalah, (b) his comparison of Orpheus with David, whose Psalms are eff ective for Kabbalah, and (c) the aggressively Trinitarian content of Pico’s T2K ­t heses, with their “absolutely complete reminder of the mystery of the Trinity through a method of Kabbalah”: see esp. T2K5–6, 20, 33–34, for explicit Trinitarian content, not to speak of related motifs throughout the T2K group. 23. App. C.17.2Or5, 21; 19.2K6; Concl. 58–61; W, 31, 141–143, 166–167, 197; Corazzol 2008, 140–157; Ebgi 2014, 337–3340; Idel 2014, 38–39; Chapters 11.3 and 12.1 of this book. Wirszubski, reading quantitatem formalem continuam et discretam in T2Or21 as a quantity which is discrete, formal, and continuous all at once, proposed middah, usually proprietas in Latin, “as a synonym of sefirah,” citing Abulafia, Lib. red. fol. 265r and Recanati, Secr. fol. 283r (Corazzol, 191–192); I regard my interpretation as compatible with his—­a lso as more intelligible to Pico’s Christian audience. 24. Copenhaver 1999, 41–46; Schmidt-­Biggemann 2007, 273–278. 25. App. A.8, 18; Ba, 14–16, 32 (33, 79); Scholem 1974, 320–326, 362–368, 385–388; W, 159; Copenhaver 1999, 46–54; Chapter 11.4 and Section 1 of this chapter.



Notes to Pages 434–439

585

26. App. A.66; Ba, 122–124 (245–246); 1Esd. 1, 3–4, 7 (Vulg.): Pico wrote that Ezra not only preserved and transmitted the Law but also “corrected” it, which may indicate the pointing used by the Masoretes to vocalize the text; Corazzol 2012, 164–169, suggests that this idea came to Pico from Flavius. 27. App. A.67; Ba, 126 (247–248); 1Esd. 7:12; 4Ezra 14:1–7, 21–26, 42–48; Hamilton 1999, 34–36; Corazzol 2012, 164–169. 28. App. A.64; Ba, 118–1820 (235–238); Ecclus. 46:1 (Vulg.); Matt. 7:6, 13:44–45; Rom. 3:2; 1Cor. 2:6–7; 2Cor. 3:6; Hilar. Tract. Ps. 2.2; Orig. Comm. Matt. 10.6–8; Campanini 2008, 86–87; Terracciano 2012, 83, 97–101; 2018, 346– 347, 352–353; Chapter 11.1 of this book. 29. App. A.64–65; Ba, 120–124 (237, 243–244); Orig. Comm. Matt. 14.11–12; Contra Cels. 6.6; Ps.-­Dion. EH 1.4; Rigoni 1980, 36–39. 30. App. A.65; Ba, 120–122 (238–242); Pl. Epist. II, 312D–­E; Gell. 20.5; Plut. Isid. 354C; Diog. L. 8.42; Iamb. Vit. pyth. 28.146, 34.245–246; Synes. Insomn. pr. 31. App. A.64; Ba, 118 (235–236); Ecclus. 46:1 (Vulg.). 32. App. A.66; Ba, 124 (245); Abulafia, Ve-­zot, fol. 122r; Idel 1991, 16–27, 38–39. 33. App. A.66; Ba, 124–126 (246); Num. 11:16–17; 4Ezra 14:42–48; Hilar. Tract. Ps. 2.2; b. Sanh. 2a, 3b; Midr. Num. 13:20, 15:19–20; Zohar II, 6a, 86b; III, 161b, 260b; Terracciano 2018, 353–354; Chapter 11.3 of this book. 34. App. A.67; B, 126 (247–250); App. C.19.2K1–3, 5; Concl. 60–61; 4Ezra 14:47; like Busi 2014, 298–302, I take Pico at his word (unclear though it is) in T2K1–3, unlike Scholem 1974, 182–184, and W, 134–143; see also Fornaciari 1998, 110–111; Lelli 2014b, 96–103. 35. App. A.67; B, 126 (250): Quint. Inst. 2.13.14 mixes Greek and Latin in praecepta καθολικὰ for rules ‘without exceptions,’ suggesting that universalis was not exactly the Latin equivalent, but Cic. Att. 2.14.3 has καθολικὸν θεώρηµα for a general rule; see Idel 2007a, 274–5. Pico used Catholicus throughout the Apology, also at Orat. 63 and T2K5, to claim orthodoxy for himself. On the opposition between Sefirot and Shemot in T2K1, on sexuality, and on the levels of Pico’s curriculum, see also Chapter 11.1–4 of this book. Corazzol 2012, 170–171, suggests that the words exactam methaphisicam reflect the antiphilosophical attitude transmitted to Pico by Flavius from Recanati. 36. App. A.67; Ba, 126 (250); App. C.17.2M15; Concl. 57. 37. App. C.19.2K1–2; Concl. 61; Ezek. 1:4–28, 10:1–22; Ps.-­Dion. CH 208B–­C; EH 425B, 428C, 432C, 501D, 532C–­D; 536B–­C, 568D; MT 1000D; Maimonides, Guide, I, 3b–7a, III, 2b–11a; Davidson 2005, 107, 160–161, 243–244; Corazzol 2012, 169–174; Ivry 2016, 148–153. 38. App. C.19.2K2; Concl. 61; Abulafia, Secr. fols. 346v–347v, 362v, 417v, 420r–422r, 425v, 438r; W, 136–138, 260–261; Scholem 1974, 10–30, 105,

586

Notes to Pages 440–445

180–182; Idel 1988a, xii, 49–56, 97–103, 106, 127, 146–149, 169–170, 188, 200–209, 214–215, 235–238; 1988b, 7–41, esp. 21; 1991, 31–32, 35–50; Copenhaver 1999, 34–37. 39. John 1:14; Porph. Vita Plot. 1; C.H. 1.19; 2.12; 4.5–7; Idel 1988b, 141–144; Chapter 5.1 of this book. 40. Idel 1988a, 57–61; 1988b, 127–129, 140–141; 1998a, 65–77; Fornaciari 1998, 112–113; Chapter 11.2, 4 of this book. 41. 3Enoch 4:1–5:9 (P. Alexander in Charlesworth, adapted); Idel 1990, 236; Abrams 1994; Wolfson 1998, 345. 42. App. A.10, 67; Ba, 20, 126–128 (43, 251), with Bn, 144, 172–173; F, fol. 147r; App. C.17.2M9; Concl. 57; CVE 189, 190, 191; Cod. Chigi A.VI.190; Flavius Mithridates 1963, 80, with Wirszubski’s comments on 35–43, 66–69; W, 3–6, 15–18, 241–244; Hamilton 1993; Garin 1994c, 231–240, esp. 235; Campanini 2008, 76–77; Busi 2006b, 188–189; 2009, 167, 170–172; Chapter 11.3–4 of this book. 43. App. A.68; Ba, 128 (252); Apol. 188; Exod. 34:28; Deut. 29:5; Pirkei Avot 5:23; b. Sotah 22b, ‘Abod. Zar. 19b; Zohar I, 4a; Flavius Mithridates 1963, 89; Zatelli, Lelli and Avanzinelli 1994, 184–185. 44. App. A.68; Ba, 128–130 (253–255); Apol. 8–9; W, 69–83; also Busi 2009, 166– 170, who points out that some diff erences between the originals and the Latin versions are due to variations among manuscripts of the originals, not to deceptions by Flavius. 45. App. A.68; Ba, 128–132 (254–257); Ficino to Domenico Benivieni in 1959, 873; 1975–­, 7:26–28 (letter 22); Ter. Andr. 161, 676; Luzzati 1998 describes documents from Tuscany (not Venice) involving Yohanan Alemanno and Jews named Dattilo; also Beff a 1975; Bacchelli 2001, 65–69; Ogren 2009, 217–220; Engel 2017, 7–9. 46. App. C.19.2K4–7; Concl. 61; b. Hag., 12a; Bahir, pp 137–138, 184–185; Zohar II, 149b, 165a, 209b, 239a; III, 10b; Raya mehemna, 42b; Axelrad, Cor. fols. 182v–183r; Nachmanides, Com. SI, fols. 41v–42r; Azriel, Quaest. fols. 166–167r; SY 1.4; W, 161–162, 178, 193–194, 218, 235–238; Idel 2007a, 283– 286; 2014, 44–45; Lelli 2014, 103; Chapter 11.1 of this book. 47. App. C.19.2K6, 33, 59; Concl. 61, 64–65, 67; Exod. 15:3; Bahir, 137–138; Recanati, Comm. (1545), 57r; Secr. fols. 315–316; Gikatilla, Port. fols. 80 v–81r, 114r; W, 31, 141–142, 166–167, 178, 197, 226. Yet another Trinity of S1, S2, and S10 may be suggested by a passage of the Oration (App. A.18) read in light of thesis 2TK59: see Chapter 12.1 of this book. If sequence is disregarded, ten Sefirot can combine as triads in 120 dif­fer­ent ways. 48. App. A.63, 68; Ba, 118, 252 (234, 252); Idel 2007b, describes a dif­fer­ent numerological derivation of the Trinity from the sefirot by Abulafia; see also Idel 2014, 36–37.



Notes to Pages 446–455

587

49. App. A.69; Ba, 132–134 (258–262); Concl. 54, 58; Iamb. Vita pyth. 23.105, 28.145–147. 50. App. A.69; Ba, 132–134 (258–262); Iamb. Vita pyth. 23.105, 28.145–147; Guthrie 1952, 14–15, 70–74, 256–261; West 1983, 1–38; Lamberton 1986, 22–43; Klutstein 1987, 51; Rappe 2000, 143–166; Brisson 2004, 87–106; Ebgi 2014, 236–240. 51. App. A.10, 33; Ba, 20, 62–64 (43–45, 130–135); B, sigs. TT1v–2r; Bidez and Cumont 2007, 1:47–55, 2:93–94, 103–107, 117–135; Metzger 1980, 24–30; 1983, 518; Stone 1983, 563; Yamauchi 1989, 15–16; Chapter 11.4 and 12.4 of this book. 52. App. A.57–58, 61; Ba, 106–108, 116 (222–223, 231); App. C.16; Concl. 54–56. 53. App. A.69; Ba, 132 (261); Proc. In remp. 1.74.10–31; Rappe 2000, 117–142, 157–166; Brisson 2004, 93–105. 54. App. A.62, 70–71; Ba, 116, 134–136 (233, 263–168); 12 is an apostolic number (App. A.39), and Pico addresses the F ­ athers twelve times at Orat. 1, 3, 21, 28, 30, 34, 36, 38, 54, 57, 67, and 72.

Conclusion









http://­w ww​.­irishsongs​.­com​/­lyrics​.­php​?­Action​=v­ iew&Song​_­id​= 6­ : Oh, my name is Jock Stewart, I’m a canny gaun man, and a roving young fellow I’ve been. So be easy and f­ ree when y­ ou’re drinking with me: I’m a man you d ­ on’t meet ­every day. 1. Chapter 1.1 of this book on Poliziano and the Phoenix. 2. Garin 1997c, xlviii, liv–­lv; Chapter 10.4 of this book. 3. Buchler et al. 1946, v–vi, 395–399; Columbia College’s website for the Core Curriculum, which provides a timeline, is https://­w ww​.­college​.­columbia​ .­edu​/­core​/­timeline; Nelson-­Jones 1977, 42; Rudolph 1977, 237–238; Bell 2017, 12–26. 4. Everdell 2000; https://­w ww​.­college​.­columbia​.­edu​/­news​/­jacques​-­barzun​-­cc​ -­27​-­gsas​-­32​-­distinguished​-­teacher​-­historian​-­educator​-­cultural​-­critic​-­and; un pic, not capitalized, is a ‘peak,’ ‘pick,’ or ‘woodpecker.’ 5. https://­w ww​.­herodote​.­net​/­histoire​/­evenement​.­php​?­jour​=­14941117&get​_ ­a ll​ =­1&ID​_­reac​= ­6665&tout​=­1#6665; Emison 2012, 150–151, imagines Pico quoting from the Oration in a dif­fer­ent conversation with Michelangelo in Lorenzo’s palace. 6. D’Ormesson 1971, 90–91, 232–244; also 2016, 63–64, 175–185, for the excellent En­glish translation, used ­here, by Barbara Bray.

588

Notes to Pages 455–457

7. https://­it​.­w ikipedia​.­org​/­w iki​/­Pico​_­De​_­Paperis; i paperi menano a bere le oche is a proverb: “Goslings show geese where to drink.” 8. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1.2.103; http://­w ww​.­irishsongs​.­com​/­lyrics​.­php​ ?­Action​=v­ iew&Song​_­id​= ­6.

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Zatelli, Ida, Fabrizio Lelli, and Milka Ventura Avanzinelli. 1994. ​“Pico: La cultura biblica e la tradizione rabbinica.” In Viti 1994b, 159–191. Zeldes, Nadia. 2012. ​“Language and Culture of a Sicilian Jewish Intercultural Mediator: The Hebrew Background of Flavius Mithridates.” In Perani and Corazol 2012, 17–26. Zeller, Eduard. 1844. ​Die Philosophie der Griechen: Einer Untersuchung über Charakter, Gang und Hauptmomente ihrer Entwicklung; Erster ἀ eil: Allgemeine Einleitung, vorsokratische Philosophie. Tübingen: Fues. —­—­—. 1853. ​Das theologische System Zwingli’s. Tübingen: Fues. —­—­—. 1931. ​Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy. Edited and translated by W. Nestle and L. Palmer. London: Routledge. Zika, Charles. 1984. ​Review of Craven 1981. Historical Studies 21:105–107. Zimmermann, T. C. Price. 2001. ​“Paolo Giovio.” DBI. Zinguer, Ilana, ed. 1992. ​L’Hebreu au temps de la Re­nais­sance. Leiden: Brill. Zinguer, Ilana, Abraham Melamed, and Zur Shalev. 2011. ​Hebraic Aspects of the Re­nais­sance: Sources and Encounters. Leiden: Brill. Zwingli, Huldrych. 1983. ​Ad illustrissimum Cattorum principem Philippum sermonis de providentia Dei anamnena, in Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, 6.3. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag.

Illustration Credits

Figure 1  From Liber Cronicarum ab inicio mundi (Nuremberg Chronicles) by Hartmann Schedel, first Latin edition, published Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, July 1493. Credit: The Warburg Institute Library. Figure 2  From the fresco by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, Rome. Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Figure 3  Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. Figure 4  Alleged ritual murder of Simon of Trent on March 21, 1485, from the workshop of Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff , in Liber Cronicarum ab inicio mundi (Nuremberg Chronicles) by Hartmann Schedel, first Latin edition, published Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, July 1493. Credit: The Warburg Institute Library. Figure 5  From G. Pico della Mirandola by Eugenio Anagnine, published in 1937 by Laterza. Credit: Reproduced from the author’s collection. Figure 6  From Seelenwurzgarten (ἀ e Garden of the Soul) published in 1483. Credit: Artstor. Figure 7  From Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dance of Death, 1523–1525. Credit: Alamy. Figure 8  Detail from “Credulity, Superstition, and Fanat­i­cism,” a 1762 engraving by William Hogarth. Credit: National Gallery of Art, Washington. Figure 9  Credit: Reproduced from the author’s collection. Figure 10  Credit: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool Museums. Figure 11  Credit: Reproduced from Cornhill Magazine, 1863, vol. 7, p. 153, from the author’s collection. Figure 12  Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY. Figure 13  From 1486. Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY. 657

658

Illustration Credits

Figure 14  Credit: Samuel H. Kress Collection, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Figure 15  Credits: 15a Reproduced from Paolo Giovio, Elogia virorum literis illustrium (1577), page 51, from the author’s collection; 15b Reproduced from Jean-­Jacques Boissard and Theodore de Bry, Bibliotheca chalcographica (1669), fig. Iii3, from the author’s collection; 15c from Central Institute for Cata­loging and Documentation, Rome. Figure 16  Credit: © RMN-­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. Figure 17  Credit: Reproduced from the author’s collection. Figure 18  Credit: Detail from Andrea Alciato, Emblematum libellus (1534), reproduced from the author’s collection. Figure 19  Credit: Reproduced from the author’s collection. Figure 20  Credit: National Central Library, Florence. Figure 21  Credit: Reproduced from the author’s collection. Figure 22  Credit: © Disney.

Index

abasement, man’s polymorphous potential for, 383 Abbagnano, Nicola, 142, 152 abduction of Margherita, 168, 175, 180, 189, 356 Abraham (Biblical figure; S4), 372, 383, 398, 399, 400–402, 403, 404, 443, 489, 499 Abulafia, Abraham, 335, 342, 343, 344–345, 347, 349, 350, 351, 359, 365, 378, 381, 389, 398, 399, 422, 436, 439, 440 act (atto), 132, 140 action, 150 Acts, Book of, 428 actualism, 132, 133, 134, 136, 140, 156 Adam (Biblical figure; S6), 40, 41, 111, 357, 367, 386, 488, 489; form of, 359; freedom promised to, 367; God’s speech to, 26–27, 268–269, 270, 273, 274, 358, 359; in image and likeness of God, 61; skins of, 390, 494 admiration, 65 Adonai (S10), 345, 378, 432, 445 aestheticism, Pater’s, 286 aesthetics, 251–252 Against the Astrologers (Pico). See Disputations (Pico) age, 406, 407, 412, 442–443 Age of Criticism, 210, 240 agency, 80, 89, 139, 326, 370 Agent (or Active) Intellect (S10), 347, 348, 350, 365, 379, 380, 381, 386, 388, 422, 440, 486

Aglaophemus, numbers and, 418 Agrippa, Cornelius, 208, 216, 218, 221, 257, 258, 260, 266 Agrippa von Nettesheim, 219 Ai (S6), 400, 402 Albert the ­Great, 212, 213, 411, 412 Alberti, Leon Battista, 21, 22, 55, 71, 74, 295 Alcibiades, 363, 393 Alexander VI (pope), 178, 198, 214 Alkindi, 422, 423, 493 allusions, 380 ambition, holy, 368 Ambrogini, Angelo. See Poliziano (Angelo Ambrogini) Ambrose, 166 amulet, 433–434 Anabaptists, 205, 224 Anagnine, Eugenio, 107, 109, 112–120, 121, 316 Ananin, Evgeny Arkedevitch. See Anagnine, Eugenio And ἀ is to Yehuda (Abulafia). See Ve-­zot li-­Yehud (Abulafia) androgyny, 347, 379 angel magic, 421, 441 Angel of Death, 366, 387, 404 angelic rank, 28, 41, 367–372, 376 angels, 362, 381; becoming like, 26, 357, 366, 367–374, 394, 396, 397, 441; in Faustus, 332; hierarchy of, 488; ­humans’ proximity to, 322; interactions with ­humans, 433; Jacob’s vision of, 377–378;

659

660

Index

angels (continued) love and, 426; magic and, 422; Mankind’s angelic potential, 441; Metatron (Enoch), 364–365, 366, 368, 372, 383, 418, 421, 422, 431, 440–441; in t­ heses, 411, 485, 489, 491; in university curriculum, 411–412. See also archangels; Cherubic life; Cherubim; Seraphim; Thrones Anglophone audience, 4, 196, 276–310. See also ­England; More, Thomas; North Amer­i­ca anima, 47 animus, 47 Anselm of Canterbury, 42, 43, 412 antiquity, 75–76, 83–84. See also classicism; Re­nais­sance anti-­Semitism, 97, 190. See also Jews Apocalypse, 18, 19 apocrypha, 365, 436 a-­polla, 392 Apollo, 379–380, 388–389, 392–393 Apology (Pico), 99, 179; in biblio­graphies, 20; Christ’s divinity in, 428; disclaimer in, 413; Gianfrancesco’s publication of, 162; Greswell and, 283; in Life, 164, 166, 177; magic in, 423, 431; as part of ­whole, 127; philosophical traditions in, 412; scholastic experts in, 411; sophistry in, 405; witnesses in, 412 Apuleius, 188, 422, 425 Aquinas, Thomas, 153, 202, 348, 407, 411, 412, 416, 418, 419, 490, 491, 492. See also Thomists archangels, 370–371, 381. See also angels; Gabriel (angel); Michael (angel) architecture, 52–53 Aristotle, 138, 139, 189, 203, 264, 265, 267, 347, 348, 373, 391, 404, 490; on chameleons, 362, 363; concord with Plato, 201–202, 206, 275, 416, 446, 490; on debate, 408; division of works of, 410; Life of Aristotle (Philoponus), 416; natu­ral knowledge / virtue and, 428; Neoplatonists’ view of, 415; Plato on, 410; secrecy and, 435; in t­ heses / Oration, 341, 413–414, 418, 491, 493, 500 arithmetic, 418, 432. See also mathe­matics; numbers

Arnold, Gottfried, 229, 242 Arnold, Matthew, 281, 288, 291, 308 art, 86; dignity and, 25, 30; disputation portrayed in, 408; genre paintings, 84–85; guide to, 303; Hegel on, 263; Manetti on, 52–54; medieval, 122; nakedness in, 52–54; National Gallery, 292; portrayal of peasant life in, 84–86, 88; Re­nais­sance, 292; society as, 76. See also individual artists ascent, 348, 365, 375, 376, 397, 426. See also ladder; soul asceticism, 90, 172, 174, 249–250, 254, 273, 313, 358. See also body; flesh Asmodeus, 403, 425 astrology: Abu Ma’shar’s influence on, 418; agency and, 89; ancient texts and, 79; Cassirer on, 312; determinism of, 89, 90, 380; Dulles on, 316; ethics and, 313; in Ficino’s letters, 179–180; Pico on, 89, 103, 176, 193, 194, 211, 217, 267, 312 (see also Disputations [Pico]); religion and, 79–80; support for debate, 408; values and, 313; Warburg on, 326 atheism, 135, 143, 262 Athena, 372, 408, 431 atonement, 366–367, 498 attaining (adeptio), 349 atto pensante, 132 attuazioni, 132 Aufhebung (Overcoming), 316 Aufklärer / Aufklärung, 204, 227, 241–242 Augustine, Saint, 40, 41, 153, 378, 397, 399, 411, 415, 421, 457 autobiographies, 456, 457 autoctisis, 137–139, 140, 149 Avempace (Ibn Bajja), 384, 412 Averroes (Ibn Rushd), 202, 348, 381, 412, 416, 418, 486 Averroism, 115, 348–349, 440 Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 202, 348, 411, 412, 416, 418 Bacchus, 389, 391, 392, 395, 431, 496, 498 Bacon, Francis, 110, 207, 209, 256, 259, 265, 493 Bacon, Roger, 422, 423



Index

Bahir, 335, 342–343, 377, 383, 384, 385, 386, 445 bara shit, 385 Barbaro, Ermolao, 179, 185, 186, 187, 346, 410 Bartoli, Ricardo, 232, 235–241, 284, 320, 327 bat, 385 al-­Batalyawsi, Ibn al-­Sid, 379 bathos, 55–56, 57, 58, 67 ­Battle of the Books, 211 Bausi, Francesco, 336, 357 bayit, 385 Bayle, Pierre, 211, 312 be (in), 385, 387 Beauty, 352, 386 beauty: female, 37, 38; Kant on, 251–252; male, 37, 38; Manetti on, 55; Schiller on, 253–254 Beerbohm, Max, 276–280 Begeisterung, 228 Beginning (Reshit; S2), 385, 402, 499 be­hav­ior / behaviorism, 60, 61, 62–63, 66 being, 145–146 Bellanti, Lucio, 194, 218 ben, 379 ben Gerson, Levi (Ralbag; Gersonides), 342, 380–382, 383, 388 ben Nachman, Moses (Nahmanides), 341, 380, 381, 383 ben Yohai, Shimon (Rashbi), 437, 443 Benivieni, Girolamo, 184, 294, 354, 431 Bereshit, 385, 488 Berti, Domenico, 95, 104, 105 Bessarion, Basilios, 208, 274 Beth-­El, 400, 401 Bible: dignitas in, 41; Hebrew text of, 345. See also New Testament biblio­graphies, 19–20, 95–127. See also Garin, Eugenio; Gentile, Giovanni; Oreglia, Giuseppe Bildad (Biblical figure), 381, 382 Binah, 385, 386, 443. See also Understanding (S3) Binsica, 387, 498 biographies: based on classical models, 84; comparative, 196; Inscriptions, 192–194; of Pico, 3, 260–261, 457 (see also Life

661

[Pico]); from published letters, 282. See also Life (Pico) birds of heaven, 381 Blondel, Maurice, 150, 151, 152 blood libel, 96–101, 157 Bobbio, Norberto, 113, 141–142 body, 26; Asclepius on, 330; denying /  punishment of, 192, 249; dignitas and, 44, 50–55; dislike of, 254, 439–440; escaping, 195, 397, 440; Hermetica on, 330; Kant on, 249–251; Lotario on, 43–45, 51; Manetti on, 23, 52–55, 249; need to separate soul from, 254; Oration on, 249, 254; Pico’s dislike of, 23, 283; relation with soul, 254; sin and, 50; wretchedness of, 43–45. See also flesh; ­human condition; h ­ uman nature Böhme, Jacob, 223, 227, 229, 241, 257, 265 bohu, 381 Book of ­Causes, 414, 417 Book of Redemption, 335, 336 Bottai, Giuseppe, 91, 93, 94, 142. See also National Center / Institute for Re­nais­ sance Studies Botticelli, Sandro, 304, 305 brain (S2–3), 402 Bratti, Ingramo, 12, 14 Bresit, 500 bride, 386, 387 Browning, Robert, 278, 288, 289–291, 297, 299, 300, 308 Brucker, Jacob, 26, 155, 201, 232, 241, 247, 257, 258, 261, 262, 265, 453; Critical History of Philosophy, 207–209, 232, 255, 258, 261, 262; image of Pico, 320; influence of, 235, 261; on Kabbalah, 208–209; Life and, 208; on Pico, 237, 239; promotion of eclectic ideology, 415 Bruno, Giordano, 107, 221, 265, 312, 326, 327 Buchler, Justus, 452, 453 Buck, August, 333, 334 Budde, Johann, 205–206, 207, 216, 217, 223, 228, 229 Buhle, Johann, 258, 259–260, 261, 262, 267, 284, 310 Building (S4–10), 385, 430, 488, 489, 500

662

Index

Burckhardt, Jacob, 6, 71, 72, 73–83, 91, 107, 258, 268, 269, 275, 281, 284, 286, 310, 311, 313, 325, 327, 334, 451; Cicerone, 303; citations of, 104, 106, 108; Culture of the Re­nais­sance in Italy, 71; on discovery, 84–85; Essay, 231; on individualism, 77–78; on morality, 76–78; Oration and, 86–88, 108, 118; Pico and, 83–84, 86–88, 108, 231; on social equality, 76; on superstition, 88–89 Burton, Robert, 224, 225 Cabala, 216. See also Kabbalah Calculators, 410–411 Calori Cesis, Ferdinando, 102, 103, 104 Campanella, Tommaso, 106, 107, 110, 111, 265 Canaan, 400, 401 Capreolus (Jean Cabrol), 412 care, 234 caritas (love), in New Testament, 38 Carlyle, Thomas, 288, 308 Cartesian rationalists, 211–212 carving / hewing / engraving, 377 Cassirer, Ernst, 113, 269, 311–316, 318, 319, 320, 322, 324, 325, 326, 327, 333, 334, 336, 451, 453; on astrology, 312; on Kant, 315; on magic, 314–315; on Oration, 315 Catholic Reformation, 129 Catholicism, concord with Neoplatonism, 271 causality, 312, 313, 314 Cedars (Sefirot), 385, 488 celebrity, 18, 75; Pico’s, 5, 91, 153, 157, 282, 310, 324, 456. See also fame Cellini, Benvenuto, 81, 83 centennial, Pico’s, 323, 332–334. See also Mirandola Center. See National Center / Institute for Re­nais­sance Studies Ceretti, Felice, 95–96, 102, 103, 105, 240 Chaldean Oracles, 364, 372, 373, 382, 390, 391, 398, 414, 425, 426, 446, 447 chameleon, 362–363, 364, 383 Chariot, threefold, 439, 497 Cherubic life, 404, 422. See also angels Cherubim, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 376, 394, 396, 397. See also angels

childbirth, 51 choice, 87, 143, 195–196, 317. See also freedom Christ: bride of, 386; divinity of, 335, 405, 414, 427–429, 444, 445, 495 (see also Trinity); miracles of, 427, 428, 495. See also Jesus Chris­tian­ity: dignitas and, 38–45; early, historicizing of, 269; theism distilled from, 89 Christians: concealed Law and, 434–435; study of Kabbalah, 194–195; unawareness of Kabbalah, 98 Chronicles (Nuremberg), 18–19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 99, 101 Church ­Fathers, 134, 363, 388, 404, 407, 429, 431, 446 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 34–38, 44, 48, 56, 404, 409, 414 classicism, 58, 158; biographies and, 84; Pico’s reservations about, 84; relation with Re­nais­sance, 75; superstition / magic and, 79, 90; Tiraboschi on, 234–235. See also antiquity; Re­nais­sance classics, 34. See also antiquity Clayton, Richard, 281, 282 climb. See ascent cock, 395–396 comedy, 5, 56–57, 58 Commento (Pico), 21, 190, 200, 354 Conclusions. See 900 Conclusions (Pico); ­t heses, Pico’s concord, 271, 351, 412, 415, 416, 417, 418, 453, 454. See also peace concordia, 202, 203, 204 Concordia, Italy, 13, 14, 180 concordism, 201–202, 203 concretezza (concreteness), 137, 138, 139–140, 149 conditioning, 62–63, 64 conflict, 382, 383. See also peace Congregation of Israel (S10), 385, 386, 489 Con­temporary Civilization in the West (university course), 452–453 Copenhaver, Rebecca, 4 Corneo, Andrea, 168, 189 correspondence. See letters counter-­enlightenment, 241



Index

courtiers, philosophy for, 204–205 covenant (foedus), 382, 383 Craven, William, 333–334, 335 creation, 385, 488; agent of, 138; Aristotle on, 139; Pico’s retelling of, 180, 195, 359; witnessing, 138. See also Adam; Genesis creativity, types of, 75 critical stance, 242 Criticism, Age of, 210, 240 Croce, Benedetto, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 128, 136, 137, 152 Crown (S1), 345, 375, 402 cultural history, Burckhardt and, 73 culture: destroyed by individualism, 83; En­glish, 288; Italian, 108–109, 119, 122, 123 Cusanus, Nicholas of (Nicholas of Cusa), 275, 312, 313, 318 cutting off , 349–350, 488, 489 da Barga, Antonio, 32, 45 D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 210, 212 darkness, 362, 376, 389 Dasein, 132, 144, 145, 146–147, 157 David (Biblical figure), 189, 354, 359, 431, 496, 498 David (Donatello), 53–54 David (Michelangelo), 53 Days (Sefirot), 385, 402, 488 De ente et uno (Pico), 162, 164, 166, 176, 180, 267, 316, 317, 321 De Sanctis, Francesco, 235, 240, 308, 309, 316 death, 146, 387–388; entrance of, 403; of kiss, 387–388, 403; Michael as Messenger of, 404; Pascal on, 198; Pico’s, 165, 167, 181, 183, 193; practicing for, 161, 396, 440; types of, 396–397 Death, Angel of, 366, 387, 404 debate / disputation, 404, 405, 406–407, 408, 413 decet, 37 decorum, 36, 37 de-­demonizing pro­cess, 325 Del Medigo, Elia, 115, 348, 349, 355, 444 Del Sarto, Andrea, 290 Del Verrocchio, Andrea, 292

663

delirium (Wahnsinn), 228 Delphic maxims, 393 delusion (Schwärmerei), 248 delusion (Wahnwitz), 228, 230 democracy, individualism and, 81 demonology, 79, 421 demons, 352, 387, 393, 403, 404, 434; Azazel, 427, 433, 498; ‘Chameleon,’ 362; Christians and, 421; in Faustus, 332; fear of, 315, 326, 441; love and, 426; magic and, 420, 421, 427; Samael, 433; in ­t heses, 411, 489; in university curriculum, 411–412 denary, 351, 500, 501 derash, 399 Descartes, René, 140, 155, 156, 221, 238–239, 312, 328 determinism, 89, 90, 380, 381 Di Giovanni, Vincenzo, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109 Diderot, Denis, 209–210 dignità, Bartoli’s omission of, 240 dignitas, 4; in Bible, 38–40, 41; body and, 50–55; Christian, 38–45; Cicero on, 34–38; exclusion by, 50; Garin on, 106–107; lack of in Oration, 55; Lombard on, 47; male beauty, 37, 38; Manetti and, 45–55; omitted from Life, 177; omitted from Lyfe, 171, 177; in Oration, 28, 32; in Pico’s letters, 185; Re­nais­sance and, 55; translations of, 29, 30; Würde identified with, 26, 50. See also dignity dignity, 4; in biographical summaries of Pico, 261; body and, 249–251; comedy and, 56–57; confusion about in Re­nais­ sance, 157; continued ­battles over, 67–68; in debate about humanism, 155–156; Garin on, 134; Heidegger’s opposition to humanism and, 147; as ­human right, 31; Kant on, 24–31, 33, 240, 241, 249–251; modernity and, 29; nakedness and, 55; of peasants, 85–86; Pico as champion of, 107, 108; Pico’s awareness of, 258; reason and, 246; in relation to grace, 252–254; Schiller on, 253; Skinner on, 61, 64; strain on, 55–56; in UN Declaration, 31, 57. See also dignitas; Würde

664

Index

dignity, lit­er­a­ture of, 64, 65, 66–67 dignity of man (Würde des Menschen), 268–269 dignus, 37, 49 Dionysius the Areopagite, 360–361, 362, 368, 369–370, 372, 375, 376, 377, 388, 389, 423, 435, 438, 499 discovery, 75–76, 84–85 discrete quantity, 432 disputation. See debate / disputation Disputations against Astrology (Pico), 89, 90, 162, 164, 194, 217, 218–219, 259, 314, 316 divinity, 360, 377. See also Christ Doe With One Horn, 430, 489 dogma, vs. scripture, 229 dogmatism, 227, 242–243, 256, 272, 317, 410 Donatello, 53 Dreydorff , Georg, 269, 271–274, 284 Drummond, Robert, 160 drunkenness, 391–392, 498 Dulles, Avery, 315–318, 319, 320, 329, 333 Dwelling (S10), 386, 399. See also Shekinah (S10) E, Delphic, 392 earth, all (kol-­ha-­aretz), 366 East (S6), 383, 399, 489 eclecticism / eclectic phi­los­o­phers, 202–207, 216, 217, 227, 229, 247, 257, 259, 415 Eco, Umberto, 334 ecstasy, 391–395, 439 education, 91, 93, 114, 201, 407. See also erudition Ehyeh (S1), 345, 432, 445 ei, Delphic, 393 eklegein, 203 Ek-­sistence, 157 Ek-­sistenz, 146 El, 345 El Shaddai, 345, 441 Ele­ments of Morality for Teaching the Young, 236 Eliezer, Rabbi, 341 Elihu (Biblical figure), 381, 382, 406 Eliot, George, 278, 288, 293–297, 299, 300, 308

Elohim, 345, 432 emolumenta, 28 Empedocles, 364, 380, 382, 383, 418 empiricism, 248, 324 Enfield, William, 201, 255 ­England: En­glish stories about Pico, 276–310; image of Italy in, 287–297; image of Pico in, 311; knowledge of Re­nais­sance in, 281; Oxford University, 410–411; Pico’s celebrity in, 282; religious sects in, 225; support for Italy in, 309; tourism to Italy and, 297–303. See also Anglophone audience En­glish (language): lit­er­a­ture on Pico in, 311; Pico’s works in, 321. See also Anglophone audience; Lyfe of Iohan Picus (More); individual writers Enlightenment, 46, 223, 239, 242, 263 Enoch (Metatron), 362, 364–365, 366, 368, 372, 383, 418, 421, 422, 431, 440–441, 486 Entdämonisierung, 325 enthusiasm, 195, 216, 224–225, 228, 240, 275. See also Schwärmer / Schwärmerei Entzauberung, 325 environment, 62–63, 64 Epiphany, 405, 501 epopteia, 377, 390–391 Erasmus, Desiderius, 155, 159–162, 168, 285, 322, 323, 363, 453 Erlindo, Vittorio, 332, 333 erôs, 394, 395 erotic metaphysics, 427 erudition, 79, 210–211, 212–214, 215, 216, 261 Esdras, Book of, 351, 434 Esdras / Ezra, 434, 437, 438, 448 ’esh (fire), 371, 381 esistenzialismo. See existentialism essentia, 147 Este ­family, 231–232, 233, 236 ethics, 37, 313, 389 Ethiopic script, 366, 398, 441–442, 448 Eucharist, 408, 491 eudaemonism, 272, 273 Eufrates, 398 Euride (Miranda), 12, 13 every­t hing alive (kol-­nefesh), 366



Index

exaltation, man’s polymorphous potential for, 383 excellence, ­human, 33 excellentia, 39, 40, 49, 50 existentia, 147 existentialism, 120, 127, 133, 134, 135, 141–153, 158. See also Sartre, Jean-­Paul Existenz, 144, 146 Exodus 14, 433 exposition, of Oration: Oration I, 1–10, 358–367; Oration II, 11–15, 367–374; Oration III, 16–19, 375–380; Oration III, 20–25, 380–388; Oration III, 26–32, 388–397; Oration III, 33–35, 397–404; Oration IV, 36–45, 404–409; Oration IV, 46–55, 409–419; Oration V, 56–62, 420–429; Oration VI, 63–68, 429–445; Oration VII, 69–72, 446–449 Extremities (S4–8, S10), 385, 430, 488 ’Eyn-­sof (No-­End), 345, 444 Ezekiel (Biblical figure), 369, 377, 386, 438 Ezra / Esdras (Biblical figure), 311–312, 313, 324, 434, 437, 438, 448 Facio, Bartolomeo, 31, 32, 45 fame, 75, 153; Pico’s, 3–4, 6, 21, 217, 218, 257, 261, 305, 308. See also celebrity fanatisme, 215, 216 al-­Farabi, 384, 412 Fascism, 91, 93, 108, 112, 114, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129–130, 132–133, 152. See also Bottai, Giuseppe; Gentile, Giovanni; Papini, Giovanni fatalism, 79–80, 312 ­Father (S1), 379, 445, 497 Fatherland, 365, 366 female, 385, 399 Fichte, Johann, 262, 266 Ficino, Marsilio, 115, 203, 207, 208, 233, 234, 264, 266, 267, 268, 274, 294, 295, 312, 327, 328, 405; age of, 302; On Being and the One and, 180; Brucker on, 235; correspondence of, 162; on Delphic greetings, 393; explications by, 372, 373; ­handling of philosophy, 259; instruction of Pico, 379; interest in Pico, 179; letters of, 178–183, 187; on Life, 183; magic and,

665

421, 422; in Miracle of the Sacrament, 301; on Muses, 391; owner­ship of On Mysteries of Egypt, 414; Pico compared to, 310; Pico confused with, 454; Pico’s letters to, 187; Pico’s scandals and, 187; Pimander, 416; on Proteus, 364; reason and, 257; study of Neoplatonists, 415; study of Synesius, 394; translations by, 286, 330, 360, 372–373, 447; views of Pico, 191 fiction, relation with history, 295–296 fire (’esh), 371, 381, 501 Flavius Mithridates, 118, 222, 342–343, 346, 349, 350, 352, 355, 380, 386, 388, 398, 405, 431, 441, 442, 443, 444 flesh: abasing, Lyfe as guide to, 175–176; Angel of Death and, 366; scourging of, 171. See also body flesh, all (Kol-­basar), 366, 368 Florence, 178; art in, 53; Burckhardt on, 80; conditions in, 180–181; invasion of, 181, 193; tourism in, 298–303. See also Savonarola, Girolamo foedus (covenant), 382, 383 Foresti, Giacomo Filippo, 20–21, 101 Foundation (Fundamentum; S9), 355, 356 four, patterns of, 376 fourfold, 379, 432 France, 236–237, 253, 453–454 Francis of Meyronnes, 411, 412 Franck, Adolphe, 97, 104 Francke, August, 206, 225, 226, 227, 229 freedom, 111–112, 380; Burckhardt on, 88; Hegel on, 262; Kant on, 247–254; Kirk on, 322; lit­er­a­ture of, 63–64, 66–67; modernity and, 29; negative, 90; positive, 90; promised to Adam, 367; relation with nature, 258, 270, 314, 318, 326; relation with reason, 318; Re­nais­ sance and, 285; Skinner on, 61, 63–64. See also choice; liberty frenzy, 391–395 Gabriel (angel; S5), 371, 398, 399, 402, 403, 422. See also archangels Gaff arel, Jacques, 221–222, 284 Galileo Galilei, 312, 328

666

Index

Garin, Eugenio, 2, 91, 106–107, 108–111, 135, 311, 316, 333, 334, 335, 336, 451, 452; ­a fter Fascism, 125; commemoration of Pico and, 126–127; on Croce’s reform of Hegelian idealism, 137; dignity of man and, 133, 134; existentialism and, 133, 134, 136, 141, 142, 149, 150, 152–153; Fascism and, 129–130, 132–133; on Heidegger, 143–144, 147; History of Philosophy, 136, 141, 143, 144, 149, 150, 152; on humanism, 125, 126, 135; Humanismus, 134, 135; on Kabbalah, 127; Papini and, 123–126; philosophical misunderstanding of, 156; Pico as existentialist and, 151; Pico’s letters and, 162, 178; profession of ideology, 131–132; relation with Gentile, 112–113, 128–131, 140, 152; relation with Papini, 129; on Re­nais­sance, 124; review of Studia Humanitatis, 123; on self-­made ­human, 121; translation of Oration, 120, 121; view of Sartre, 143 garments, 390, 494, 498, 499 Gates of Understanding, 430, 501 general education movement, 452 Genesis, 39, 89, 488. See also creation Gentile, Giovanni, 91, 105–108, 110, 141, 152, 311, 336, 451; act and, 132; actualism of, 132, 136, 156; autoctisis and, 139, 140; concretezza of, 149; on Croce, 137; death of, 128, 129; debate in Primato and, 142; Fascism and, 112, 130, 152; French philosophy and, 151–152; Garin’s assessment of, 124; General ἀ eory of the Spirit as Pure Act, 132, 139, 140; Giordano Bruno and Re­nais­sance ἀ ought, 106; idealism of, 131; immanentism and, 151; “Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals,” 119, 133; Modernism and, 150, 151; narrative of Italian philosophy, 109; on Pascendi, 151; philosophical misunderstanding of, 156; power over Italian culture, 108–109; protection of Kristeller, 109; publishers of, 136; real­ity and, 137, 140; relation with Croce, 128; relation with Garin, 112–113, 128–131, 140; scholarship of, 111–112; update of Pico, 157 geometry, 432

Germany, 225–227, 241; Nazis, 94, 145, 148 Gersonides (Ralbag; Levi ben Gerson), 342, 380–382, 383, 388 Giles of Rome, 411–412, 485, 490 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 109, 138 Giorgio (Zorzi), Francesco, 208, 219, 266 Giovio, Paolo, 192–194, 282, 290, 301, 304 glory, 385 gnosticism, 327, 329 God, 378; dead, 290; hidden, 444; image / likeness of, 40, 41, 42–43, 61, 359; as Man of War, 445, 499; Names of, 345, 432, 439, 445, 489, 497; perfection of, 361; sexuality of divinity, 386; threefold, 432; Throne of, 439; u ­ nion with, 331–332 gods, pagan, 326, 331, 361, 364 goêteia, 420–421, 424, 425, 426. See also magic Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 147, 332 goetia, 421 goodness, 46 Gorgias of Leontini, 404, 409 grace, 252–254 Grassi, Ernesto, 123, 135, 141, 148 Greatness (S4), 345 Greek (language), magic in, 420–421. See also goêteia; mageia Green Line, 430, 488, 499 Greswell, William, 282–284 Grotius, Hugo, 204, 205 gullibility, Pico’s, 240, 283 hagiography / hagiographies, 166, 168 ha-­kol, 387 Hallam, Henry, 298, 299 Hamann, Johann Georg, 241, 243, 245, 246 Hammer of Witches, 406, 430 Hankins, Jim, 4 harmonies, revived by Re­nais­sance, 122. See also concord Harran, 400 Hasmalim, 370 Hazlitt, William, 287 heart (S6), 402, 403 heaven, Paul’s vision of, 375, 376, 397 Heavens (shamayim; S6), 371, 381 Hebraica veritas, 219



Index

Hebraism, Pico’s, 219 Hebrew alphabet / letters, 190, 392, 439; alef, 340, 379, 445, 499; ’av, 379; bet, 340, 379, 385, 386, 500; gimel, 340; he, 385, 432, 499; mem, 353; mem, closed, 352, 417, 499; as numbers, 340; nun, 379; shin, 379, 445, 499; taw, 379; tsade, 354, 355; vav, 499; waw, 432; yod, 432, 445, 499; zayin, 355, 385 Hebrew texts, Vatican and, 218 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 73, 112, 128, 136, 146, 156, 261–266, 275, 309, 315, 324 Hegelians, Italian, 108, 316 Heidegger, Martin, 132, 134, 135, 142, 144, 149, 156, 157; Being and Time, 135–136, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149; Garin and, 143–144, 147, 156; in History of Philosophy, 149, 152; “On Humanism,” 134; misunderstanding of, 145, 147; Nazis and, 148; opposition to humanism, 147; phenomenology of, 151; “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” 148; on Sartre, 145 hell, powers of, 368 Heman, 368 hemlock, 395 Henry of Ghent, 407, 411, 412 Heptaplus (Pico), 180, 194, 217; in biblio­graphies, 20; Christianized Kabbalah in, 104; En­glish version of, 321; in Foresti, 21; Gianfrancesco on, 176; Gianfrancesco’s publication of, 162, 164; in Inscriptions, 193; in Life, 166; Pico on, 190; Ritter on, 267; Sisto on, 218; Spaventa on, 108; translations of, 219 heresy: Modernism as, 150–151; in 900 Conclusions, 210; Pico’s detection of, 176; secularization of idea of, 229 Hermes Trismegistus, 217, 321, 330, 422. See also Hermetic tradition; Hermetica Hermetic attitude, Pico’s, 329 Hermetic tradition, 327. See also Hermes Trismegistus; Hermetica Hermetica, 61, 121, 329, 330 hexagram, 433–434 hexameral theology, 195 Heytesbury, William, 410 Hilary, 435, 436

667

Historia philosophica (Horn), 201–202 histories of philosophy, 128, 200–202, 258 history, 121–123, 125, 295–296 Hiyya, 443 Hokmah (Wisdom, S2), 379, 385 Holy of Holies, 389 Holy Spirit, 39, 41, 352, 432, 440, 443, 444, 445, 497. See also Trinity Homer, 364, 365–366, 383, 423 homo­sexuality, 285, 356 honor, 77 honor, 39, 40 Horace, 202, 203 hoti, 291 ­human, self-­made, 121 ­human condition, 328–329, 439–440. See also body ­human features, 48–49 ­human nature, 43–45. See also body; ­human condition humanism / humanismus, 2, 72, 312; blind devotion to antiquity and, 83–84; Burckhardt on, 75; confusion about, 154–156; consequences of using term, 154–155; debt to scholasticism, 316; essence of, 322; existentialism and, 142–143, 145, 158; Garin on, 125, 126, 135; Heidegger’s opposition to, 147; ideological confusion about, 155–156; in Italy, 71, 72, 76; Miller on, 321; narrative confusion about, 155; in Oration, 319; philosophical misunderstanding of, 156; Pico and, 143, 153–154; in Pico’s era, 153; Schiller in, 254; Skinner on, 66; taxonomical confusion about, 154. See also humanism; secularism humanists, 84, 234 humanity, elimination of, 361 Hume, David, 241, 255 Husserl, Edmund, 144, 145, 156 hyperbole, 56 ia, 392 Iamblichus, 187, 188, 330, 360, 372, 376, 377, 395, 397, 417, 423; ascent and, 426; love and, 427; On Mysteries of Egypt, 414; numbers and, 418; on Orphic Hymns, 446; on Pythagorean arithmetic theology, 446; in t­ heses / Oration, 414

668

Index

Ibn Adret, Shlomo ben Abraham (Rashba), 342, 343 Ibn Bajja (Avempace), 384, 412 Ibn Rushd (Averroes). See Averroes Ibn Sina (Avicenna). See Avicenna iconography, Pico’s, 300–308 idealism, 112, 131, 133, 134, 136–137, 317, 318 Idel, Moshe, 1, 120, 335 Idris, 418 illumination, 485 image (imago), 39, 40, 42 images, 18–19, 23, 326 immanence, 272 immanent idealism, 112 immanentism, 151 immortality, 46, 49, 74–75 impregnation, mysteries of, 343, 347, 381 in (be), 385, 387 incarnation, 375, 397 individualism, 71, 77–78, 80, 81, 83 individuality, 74, 75–76, 78–79 Infinite (No-­E nd; ’Eyn-­sof ), 345, 375. See also Crown (S1) Innocent III (pope). See Lotario dei Segni Innocent VIII (pope), 26, 79, 99, 198, 214, 355, 405, 406, 441, 490, 501. See also papal condemnation of Pico’s t­ heses innovation, ­t heses about, 417, 491 Intellect, Agent (or Active). See Agent (or Active) Intellect intercourse, sacred, 386. See also sex investigation of letters as numbers, 392 iron of sages, 408 irrationalism, 207 Isaac (Biblical figure; S5), 355, 372, 399, 401, 402, 498 Ish, 445 Isis, robes of, 390 Italian Historical Institute, 309 Italy: in Africa, 122; Burckhardt on, 73–83; class in, 87; En­glish support for, 309; En­glish tourism to, 297–303; humanism in, 71, 72, 76; image of in E ­ ngland, 287–297; modern Italian lit­er­a­ture on Pico, 95–127 (see also di Giovanni, Vincenzo; Garin, Eugenio; Gentile,

Giovanni; Oreglia, Giuseppe); politics in, 74; Re­nais­sance in, 71; state in, 73–74; view of Pico in, 95, 105 Jacob (Biblical figure; S6), 27, 357, 372, 375, 377–378, 384, 386, 388, 399, 400, 401, 433 Jacobi, Friedrich, 228, 242, 243, 244, 245 Jansenism, 196 Jaspers, Karl, 142, 144, 148, 149 Jesuits, 96, 101, 151, 233, 235 Jesup, Edward, 196–198, 200, 216 Jesus, 386, 389, 497, 499; dignitas of, 42; preceding Abraham, 402, 499; secrets of, 435. See also Christ Jews: ancient mysteries of, 429; anti-­ Semitism, 97; blood libel and, 96–101, 157; burning of, 18, 19, 23; in Chronicles, 101; conversation with Chris­t ian­ity, 451; debates with, 443–444; Dreyfus scandal, 97; executions of, 101; forced baptisms of, 96–97; Gentile’s protection of, 109; Kabbalah used against, 240, 342; mysteries as weapons against, 430; Pico on, 176; recovery of Law, 434; in Story of Christ, 94; understanding of Pico’s proj­ect, 405; ways of reading scripture, 341–342 Job (Biblical figure), 51, 357, 371, 380–383, 384, 388, 400, 406, 489 Job, Book of, 396 Jubilee, 430, 501 judgment, 251–252, 372 Judgment (S5), 371, 402, 498 Just (S9), 355, 498 justice, 381 jynxes, 425 Kaaba, 404 Kabbalah, 97, 120, 327, 495; Abulafia on, 344, 350; accepting, while rejecting astrology, 313; accusations of Judaizing and, 218; in American textbooks, 321; in Anagnine’s study, 115, 118–120; annihilation of self and, 172; Berti on, 95; Brucker on, 208–209; Budde’s study of, 206; Christian support for, 221–222; Christians’ study of, 194–195; Christ’s divinity / Trinity and, 104, 322, 335, 342,



Index

405, 414, 427, 429, 430, 445, 495; Dulles on, 316, 317; in Essai sur les moeurs, 214; as evidence against Jews, 342, 430; “exposition of the six days,” 21; fake manuscripts of, 222; Faustus and, 332; Franck’s study of, 104; Garin on, 109–110, 127; good, Pico’s belief in, 99; imitators, 219; influence on Oration, 346; Intellect in, 440; knowledge compared with, 428; Kristeller on, 320; in Life, 176, 177; linked with Paul’s teaching, 375; lit­er­a­ture of, 342; magic and, 421, 422, 428; Massetani on, 104; meaning of term, 429, 436; omitted from Lives of Picus and Pascal, 198; omitted from Lyfe, 177; Oration and, 28, 351, 357, 417, 430; Oreglia on, 98–99; in Pico Boxes, 194; Pico’s fame and, 218; Pico’s hopes for concord in, 351; in Pico’s letters, 190; Pico’s proj­ect and, 429, 430; Pico’s sources on, 335, 336; practical, 437–438, 497; practicing, 346; in Retrospective Review, 284; risks of, 220; Ritter on, 267; in scholarship on Pico, 109–110; Scholem’s work on, 335; secrecy in, 435; self-­made ­human and, 121; Semprini on, 106; Simon on, 222–223; Sisto and, 217–218; speculativus, 438; syncretists and, 208; in t­ heses, 90, 104, 110, 190, 341, 350–351, 417, 418, 421, 437, 438, 486, 488, 495, 496–501; turning into angels and, 26; ­union with God and, 331–332; unknown to Christians, 98; used against Jews, 240, 496–501; Voltaire on, 215; Wirszubski on, 334–336. See also occultism Kabbalah lit­er­a­ture: angelic rank in, 370; cost of, 443; subsidized by Sixtus IV, 430; in t­ heses, 414; translations of, 349, 350, 441 (see also Flavius Mithridates) Kabbalah of Numerations, 345. See also Numerations Kabbalistic Library of Giovanni Pico, 336 Kabbalists, 359. See also Abulafia, Abraham kafron, 398 kalah (bride), 387 kalal, 387

669

Kant, Immanuel, 5, 134, 139, 153, 156, 216, 257, 275, 318; achievement in philosophy, 241; on aesthetics, 251–252; on Age of Criticism, 210; Anthropology from a Practical Point of View, 248, 250; on asceticism, 249–250; on beauty, 251–252; on body, 249–251; Cassirer on, 315; “On a Condescending Tone Recently Raised in Philosophy,” 246; on conduct, 248; ἀ e Conflict of the Faculties, 245; Critiques, 24–26, 228, 242, 252, 255, 262; deference shown to, 262; dignity and, 24–31, 33, 50, 155, 241, 249–251; Dreams of a Spirit-­S eer, 217, 245; on enthusiasm, 195 (see also Schwärmer / Schwärmerei); foreshadowed by Pico, 312, 315; influence of, 326; on metaphysics, 245; Metaphysics of Morals, 25, 28; “price,” 24–25, 29, 158, 248; proof of God and, 243; Reinhold on, 243; Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 245; responsibility for ­mistakes about Pico, 58; on Schwärmer /  Schwärmerei, 228–229, 240, 244–247; on sex, 249; sublime, 252; on Swedenborg, 217; theory of knowledge, 312; Tiedemann’s dislike of, 259; “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?,” 244; Würde and, 29, 248 Kedar, 167 Kedem, 400 Kepler, Johann, 193, 194, 312 Kerubim, 370. See also Cherubim King of Glory, 384, 386, 387 Kingdom (S10), 350, 352, 356, 488, 501 Kingdom of All Worlds, 501 Kingdom of Man (regnum hominis), 109, 110, 119, 120, 125, 131 Kings, Book of, 488 Kirk, Russell, 321–323 Kis’oth (Thrones), 368, 369, 370, 372, 376 kiss (neshiqah), 387 “know yourself,” 393 knowledge, 126; compared with magic and Kabbalah, 428; of divinity, 377; forsaking of, 377; judgement and, 372; Kant’s theory of, 312; love and, 372; magic and, 429; vs. reason, 244; river of, 438 Knowledge (S1b), 387, 389

670

Index

kol-­basar (all flesh), 366, 368 kol-­ha-­aretz (all earth), 366 kol-­nefesh (every­t hing alive), 366 Koran, 188, 364, 447 Kristeller, Paul, 2, 109, 123, 311, 316, 318–321, 322, 333, 334, 335, 336 ladder, 347–351; climbing, 377; divine Names as, 378; Jacob’s dream of, 375, 377–378, 433; mystery / secret of, 343, 381; philosophy as, 378; Pico on, 378–379; in Pico’s sources, 378; sefirotic, 401; steps of, 376 Ladder of Paradise (John Climacus), 378 lambda, 353 languages: Pico myth and, 235; in Vatican Library, 442 Laterza, Giovanni, 107, 114 Latin: Erasmus’s letters and, 160; Kabbalah in, 441; knowledge of, 34; magic in, 420; of Oration, 120 Lavelle, Louis, 144, 149, 150, 152 Law, 429, 434, 435, 436 law, moral, 25, 312 law, universal, 25 laws of nature, 312 Le Senne, René, 144, 149, 150, 152 learning: Pico’s, 283; Plato’s theory of, 179; as sin, 176; as step ­toward religious life, 186. See also education Lee, Vernon, 299 Lehrbuch (Windelband), 274 Leibniz, Gottfried, 204, 205, 211, 223, 255, 260, 328 Leo I (the ­Great; pope), 41–42, 44 Leo X (pope), 72, 160 Leonardo da Vinci, 75, 312 Lessing, Gotthold, 242–243, 332 letteratura, use of term, 234 letters: biographies from, 282; Erasmus’s, 160; Ficino’s, 178–183, 187; Pico’s, 162–164, 168, 169–178, 185–192 liberté, 239 liberty (libertas), 177, 240, 319. See also freedom libraries: Kabbalistic Library of Giovanni Pico, 336; Vatican Library, 408, 442; Warburg’s, 324, 327

Life (Pascal), 199 Life (Pico), 12, 16, 21, 164–168, 196, 200, 222, 248–249; Bartoli’s use of, 237; Brucker and, 208; Burckhardt and, 84, 87; on concord, 416; Ficino on, 183; Greswell’s use of, 282; as hagiography, 168; image of Pico in, 320; influence of, 261; letters in, 163; Oration in, 168; Oration omitted from, 16; on Pico’s debating skills, 407; Pico’s ­mother in, 305; on Pico’s motivations, 409; Pico’s writings in, 166; publication of, 162; Symonds’s use of, 285–286; Tiraboschi’s use of, 234, 236; translated by More, 168 (see also Lyfe of Iohan Picus [More]); works omitted from, 17 light, 398, 399, 500 likeness (similitudo), 39, 42, 351 lit­er­a­ture, Eu­ro­pean, Hallam’s history of, 298 lit­er­a­ture of dignity, 64, 65, 66 lit­er­a­ture of freedom, 63–64, 66–67 liver (S10), 402, 403 Locke, John, 210, 214, 255 logic, 405 Lombard, Peter, 45, 47, 411 Lord, 378 Lord of the Nose, 430, 489 Lotario dei Segni (Innocent III), 43–45, 173 love, 38, 161, 372, 394, 426–427 Love (S4), 345, 371, 401, 433, 444, 497 Lucifer, 352, 500 Lull, Ramon, 219, 265 Luporini, Cesare, 142, 144, 149, 151, 152 Luther, Martin, 205, 207, 224, 225, 227, 241 Lutherans, 225 Lyfe of Iohan Picus (More), 169–178, 195, 196, 198, 200, 282, 285, 286, 320 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 80, 205, 294, 323 Madonna of the Magnificat (Botticelli), 305 mageia, 420–421, 422, 424, 425. See also magic Magi, 420, 448, 493, 494 magia, 420, 421. See also magic magic: accepting, while rejecting astrology, 313; in American textbooks, 322; ancient



Index

texts and, 79; angels and, 422; in Apology, 431; bad vs. good, 421; in Cambridge History of Philosophy, 328; Cassirer on, 314–315, 325; Chaldean, 423; charges of against Pico, 218; Christian debate on, 429–430; Christian fear of, 405; considered primitive, 324; demonic vs. natu­ral, 331, 406, 420–421; demons and, 420, 421, 427; Dulles on, 316; exotic wisdom and, 423; good, 421, 427; in Greek, 420–421; in Hermetica, 330–331; Kabbalah and, 421, 422, 428; knowledge and, 428, 429; Kristeller and, 319, 320–321; language and, 421–422; in Latin, 420; in Life, 176, 177; natu­r al, 359, 420–421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 427, 435, 495; Neoplatonism and, 425–426; numbers and, 422; in Odyssey, 423; omitted from Lives of Picus and Pascal, 198; omitted from Lyfe, 177; papal condemnation and, 208; Pico and, 89, 213–214, 218, 422–423, 429; Plato and, 423; Platonism and, 422–423; Pliny and, 422, 423; Plotinus and, 423–425; proof of Christ’s divinity and, 335, 405, 427, 495; reputation of, 221; Socrates and, 423; soul and, 424; suspicion of, 221; as theology, 420; theory of, 424–425; in ­t heses / Oration, 204, 357, 417, 421–422, 423, 425, 427, 428, 494–496; Thracian, 423; turning into angels and, 26; types of, 421, 422, 425; ­union with God and, 331–332; in university curriculum, 411–412; vineyard image, 425; Warburg on, 325, 326, 327; Zoroaster and, 423, 426. See also angel magic; goêteia; mageia; occultism Magnino, Domenico, 323 magoi, 420, 421 magus, 420, 425, 426, 495 Maimonides, Moses (Rambam), 339, 341, 342, 347, 348, 359, 380, 384, 388, 438, 440, 443, 501 male, 385, 386, 399 man: concept of, 108; humanist definition of, 147; in image / likeness of God, 359; as miracle, 358–367; Pico’s conception of, 327; Skinner on, 66

671

Man of War, 445, 499 Man the Magus, 327 Manetti, Giannozzo, 4, 45–50, 110, 111, 249, 321; on body, 23, 52–54; cited, 106; on dignitas, 50–55; On H ­ uman Worth and Excellence, 31–34; refutation of misery, 45–55; writing style, 33 Manfredo (ancestor of Pico), 12–14, 16; heirs of, 234 manuscripts, fake, 222, 283, 310, 355. See also Flavius Mithridates Marcel, Gabriel, 134, 142, 144, 149, 150 Marlowe, Christopher, 332, 406 marriage, 189–190, 386, 388, 443 Massetani, Guido, 104–105, 106, 107, 109 mathe­matics, 411, 417, 493. See also arithmetic; numbers Matthew (Biblical figure), 500 Maxims of the F ­ athers, 442–443 mayim (­water), 371, 381 Medici, Cosimo I de,’ 72, 79, 192, 279, 373 Medici, Lorenzo de,’ 9, 79, 80, 85, 86, 90, 179, 180, 185, 279, 281, 294 Medici, Piero de,’ 180 medievalism, 287 Medio, Tommaso, 188 Meditations on the Six Days of Creation, 195–196 Meiners, Christoph, 258–259, 260–261, 267, 271, 282, 310 Melanchthon, Philip, 201, 219 memoratu dignus, 49 men, universal, 74 Mendelssohn, Moses, 242, 243, 244 Mercurius Trismegistus, 414, 416, 488 Mercury, 365 Merlin, 411 Mersenne, Marin, 221, 222 Merton theory, 410–411 Messiah, 441, 443, 445, 480, 499 metaphysical psy­chol­ogy, 440 metaphysics, 147, 157, 436; erotic, 427; Ezra’s, 438; as humanist, 148; Kant on, 25, 28, 245; Pico’s, 273; polemical, 128; of time, 314; of triads, 414, 444 Metatron (Enoch), 362, 364–365, 366, 368, 372, 383, 418, 421, 422, 431, 440–441, 486

672

Index

metempsychosis, 364, 383. See also transmigration Michael (angel; S4), 371, 381, 398, 399, 402, 403, 404, 422, 433, 488. See also archangels Michelangelo, 53, 292 Michelet, Jules, 71, 281 ­Middle Ages, 263–264, 410 Midrash, 341, 343 Miller, Paul, 321 mind, withdrawing into, 362 Miracle of the Sacrament (Rosselli), 300–303 miracles, Christ’s, 427, 428 Miranda (Euride; ancestor of Pico), 12, 13 Mirandola, 96, 102–104, 126–127, 297, 303, 311, 332–334 Mirror That Does Not Shine, 430, 500 Mirror That Shines, 500 miseria (wretchedness), 43–45 misery, 43–55. See also body; ­human condition; h ­ uman nature Mishnah, 343 Mitford, Jessica, 57, 58, 67, 134 Mithridates, Flavius, 118, 222, 342–343, 346, 349, 350, 352, 355, 380, 386, 388, 398, 405, 431, 441, 442, 443, 444 modernism, 141, 150–151, 410 modernity, 29, 71, 90 Molinari, Francesco, 102, 103, 105 Moncada, Guglielmo Raimondo, 355. See also Mithridates, Flavius monism, 272 Moon, 359, 371, 396 moral character, 250 moral theory, 37 morality, 76–78, 81, 317, 389 Moravians, 229–230, 242–243, 246 More, Henry, 194, 225, 257, 284 More, Thomas, 4, 155, 159, 160, 175, 178, 189, 192, 195, 197, 198, 266, 282, 285, 286, 320, 322, 323, 453; Lyfe of Iohan Picus, 168, 169–178, 195, 196, 198, 200, 282, 285, 286, 320; Pico’s letters and, 162; study of Pico, 171, 172–176; translation of Pico’s letters, 169–171; views of Pico, 191 Morhof, Georg, 194, 200, 206

mortality, in Pico’s sonnets, 174–175 Mortara, Edgardo, 96–97 Moses (prophet), 347, 357, 362, 388–389, 392, 404, 429, 434, 435, 498, 499 Moses of Egypt, Rabbi. See Maimonides, Moses (Rambam) Mozart, W. A., 232, 406 Murray, John, 297, 298, 299, 300, 303, 308 Muses, 353, 354, 391, 392, 431, 496 Muslims, 384, 404, 412, 418 Mussolini, Benito, 91, 93, 95, 148. See also Fascism mutability, 366, 383, 393 mysteries, 377 mystic, role of, 440 mysticism, 2, 80, 94, 131, 161, 196, 219, 221, 223, 228, 229, 246, 254, 256, 273, 344, 348, 351, 360, 362, 365, 377, 397. See also Kabbalah Nahmanides (Moses ben Nachman), 341, 380, 381, 383 nakedness, 51–54, 55 Name of, 72, 340, 500 Name(s) (shem / shemot), 340, 350, 398; divine, as ladders, 378; of God, 439; knowledge of, 344; numerals of, 433 National Center / Institute for Re­nais­sance Studies, 91, 93, 121, 122, 123, 125, 299, 333. See also Bottai, Giuseppe; Papini, Giovanni nationalism, 271 naturalism, 111, 267, 268 naturalist determinism, 381 nature / Nature, 111, 247–254; Asclepius on, 330; as bridge, 388; conflict and, 382, 383; freedom and, 258, 270, 314, 318, 326; Hermetica on, 330; Kirk on, 322; laws of, 312, 359; love in, 426; magic and, 422, 424; understanding, 393 nature-­philosophers, 312 Naudé, Gabriel, 211, 217, 221, 223, 381 nehora, 398 Neofitus, 97, 98 Neoplatonic theology, 379 Neoplatonism, 256, 265, 271, 272, 273, 274, 425–426 Neoplatonists, 207, 372, 378, 415, 418, 448



Index

Nero, 58, 59 neshiqah (kiss), 387 Nesi, Giovanni, 184 New Testament, lack of dignitas in, 38 New York Times, 56, 155, 157, 453 Newton, Isaac, 214, 238, 239, 328 Nicholas of Cusa, 268, 269 Nicholas V (pope), 31 Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 153, 156, 290, 291 Nihilism, 243 900 Conclusions (Pico), 17, 26; Anagnine on, 115, 118; attacks on, 239; banning of, 17; Bartoli on, 239; in biblio­graphies, 20; commentaries on, 219; condemnation of, 26, 99, 198, 208, 209–210, 214, 237, 238, 260, 405, 408, 419, 441; disclaimer in, 413; Foresti and, 21; Gianfrancesco on, 164; Greswell and, 283; heresy in, 210; Kabbalah in, 110; knowing in, 199; mysteries about, 5; number of, 353; omitted from Life, 17; Oration as introduction to, 90; organ­ization of, 340, 413; as part of ­whole, 127; Pico’s goals and, 407; printing of, 339–340, 405; ­triple pattern in, 390. See also ­t heses, Pico’s Noah (Biblical figure), 359 nobility, decline of, 76 No-­End (’Eyn-­sof; Infinite), 344, 345, 375, 444. See also Crown (S1) North (S5), 371, 399 North Amer­i­ca, 311–322, 452–453 North Wind, 488, 488, 500, 500 Northern Fire, 489 novenary, 351, 500 Numa, 11 numbers: 1, 376; 2, 379, 385; 3, 376, 389, 430; 4, 376, 389; 5, 385, 392, 432, 434; 6, 430, 432; 7, 430; 10, 376, 430, 432; 15, 353, 432; 21, 432; 24, 434, 436; 26, 378, 432; 32, 430; 40, 353, 430, 434; 50, 501; 65, 378; 70, 351, 430, 436; 71, 436; 72, 340, 346, 350, 351, 418, 429, 432, 433, 436, 446; 86, 432; 94, 434, 436; 130, 378; 150, 431; 314, 441; 400, 340; 500, 340, 430; 600, 417; 900, 354, 409, 431; 50000, 430; letters as, 392; magic and, 422; in Oration, 430–431; in Orphic Hymns,

673

430, 431, 446, 448, 449; Pico’s view of, 417; Plato / Neoplatonists and, 418; in ­t heses, 493. See also arithmetic; mathe­matics Numbers, Book of, 498 Numerations, 345, 349, 350, 489, 497, 498, 500. See also Sefirah numerology, 314, 351–352, 417, 433 Nuremberg Chronicles, 18–19, 20, 21, 22, 99, 101, 192 nut garden, 399 objectivity, 81–83 occult philosophy, 216, 218 occultism, 217, 223, 267, 275 Ockham, William of, 241, 256, 412 On Being and the One (Pico), 162, 164, 166, 176, 180, 267, 316, 317, 321 operant conditioning, 63, 64 optimates, 34–35 Oratio de hominis dignitate (Pico). See Oration (Pico) Oration (Pico), 26, 162; accessibility to Italians, 108; advice in, 27–28; Anagnine on, 118–119; Bartoli’s omission of, 240; in biographical summaries of Pico, 260–261, 267–268; on body, 249; Burckhardt on, 86–88, 91; closing of, 446; Di Giovanni on, 104; En­g lish publication of, 9; En­g lish version of, 321; exposition of (see exposition, of Oration); focus on, 3; in Garin’s work, 110; in German biographies / histories, 273; Gianfrancesco’s publication of, 163–164; Greswell and, 283, 284; in histories of philosophy, 259–260; Italian translation of, 323; Kabbalah in, 351; lack of dignitas in, 55; Latin of, 120; in Life, 168, 177; Massetani on, 104–105; message of, 374; misunderstanding of, 2, 29, 55, 153; mysteries about, 5; numbering of, 358; omitted from biblio­graphies, 20; omitted from Life, 16; omitted from Lives of Picus and Pascal, 198; omitted from stories about Pico, 21; opening of, 61; opposition to, 404; as oratory, 367; outline of, 357–358; as part of ­whole, 127; Pico’s goals in, 451–452; Pico’s plan

674

Index

Oration (Pico) (continued) for, 26, 405; Pico’s proj­ect in, 361; pre­sen­ta­tion of, 404–405; purpose of, 17, 90, 118–119; relation with Disputations, 314; reliance on coded Jewish secrets, 26; secrets of, 357; soul / body in, 249, 254; Spaventa on, 108; structure and articulation in, 356–357; in Tenneman, 257; text of, 459–482; in textbooks, 22–23; title of, 28, 30, 32, 50, 315, 333–334; topic of, 4, 5; Traherne on, 195; translation by Garin, 120, 121; translation by Semprini, 121; translation of, 339, 358, 459–482; visibility of, 17 Oreglia, Giuseppe, 96–102, 104, 105, 106, 109, 157 Origen, 115, 378, 413, 419, 434–435, 436, 492 Orpheus, 207, 365, 372, 414, 418, 431, 446, 447, 448 Orphic Hymns, 363, 364, 373, 392, 414, 430, 431, 432, 446–447, 448–449, 496 Orphic theology, 417 Osiris, 379, 390 otium, 35, 36, 38 Ovid, 11, 425 Oxford University, 410–411 Paget, Violet, 299 Palgrave, Francis, 297, 298, 299 Pallas, 365, 372, 408, 431, 498 pantheism, 243 papal condemnation of Pico’s t­ heses, 26, 99, 198, 208, 209–210, 214, 237, 238, 260, 405, 408, 419, 441. See also Innocent VIII (pope) Papazzoni, Battista, 14–16, 17 papero, 455 Papini, Giovanni, 91, 92–94, 120–127, 129, 134, 135, 151. See also National Center / Institute for Re­nais­s ance Studies parables, 435 Paracelsus, 258, 312 Paraclete, 352, 499 Paradise, 489 paradisus, 398 Pareyson, Luigi, 141, 142

Parmenides, 365, 418, 498 Parmenides, 180, 360, 486 Pascal, Blaise, 196–199, 216 Pascal, Gilberte, 196, 197, 198, 199, 213, 229, 245, 248, 456 Pascendi Dominici gregis (Pius X), 151 passwords, 395 Pater, Walter, 55, 278, 284, 285, 286–287, 300, 304, 308, 310, 311 path of twenty-­t wo letters, 344 Patrizi, Francesco, 219, 257, 274 patronage, 46 Paul (apostle), 40, 224, 357, 367, 375, 377, 382, 388, 402, 429; on angels, 369; description of ascent, 375; proof-­text for natu­ral theology, 392; in t­ heses, 419, 497; vision of third heaven, 375, 376, 397; on youth, 406 peace, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 403, 409, 410, 416. See also concord peasant life, portrayal of, 84–86, 88 Pêkos, 10–11 penitence / penances, 184, 185, 189, 191, 249. See also repentance / reformation, Pico’s pensiero pensante, 132, 133, 137, 140, 149, 150 pensiero pensato, 140, 150 Peripatetics, 312, 412 personalities, 290 peshat, 341, 399 pessimism, 141, 142, 329 Peter (apostle), 396 Peter Lombard, 45, 47, 411 Peter the Hermit, 121 Petrarch, 32, 34, 45, 72, 155, 158, 213, 215, 453 phenomenology, 132, 145–146, 151 philology, 34, 219 phi­los­o­phers: eclectic, 202–207; Pico as, 3, 157; Pico on, 154; popu­lar, 228; sectarian, 203, 205, 207; terminology, 157–158; in t­ heses / Oration, 411, 414 philosophes, 210, 212–216, 230, 239 philosophia perennis, 151 philosophy, 243, 396; ascent and, 426; bridge / ladder and, 378; clarity and, 373–374; comprehensive (catholica),



Index

437; concord in, 201–202, 206, 275, 416, 446, 453, 454, 490; critical, 243, 255, 262, 312, 313; as cultural history, 3; defense of, 404; definitions of, 161; epoptic, 391; Erasmus on, 160; fourfold division of, 437; fragmentation of, 409–410; histories of, 128, 200–202, 258; invention of, 138–139; Kant’s achievement in, 241; methods of, 395; ­Middle Age labels of, 410; natu­ral, 275, 314, 360, 377, 382, 386, 403, 411, 415, 428, 436, 438, 490; occult, 216, 218; orienting of, 244; particularizing (particularis), 437; as Pico’s motive, 404; as practicing for death, 396; prob­lems of, 228–229; Pythagorean friendship, 395; as regimen, 395; relation with theology, 317, 404; religious ­m istakes and, 246–248; in Re­nais­s ance, 319; schools of, in Oration, 414–415; ­t heses on, 490–491; ways of d ­ oing, 419. See also individual schools philosophy, enthusiastic (schwärmerisch), 257 philosophy, French, 150, 151–152. See also individual phi­los­o­phers philosophy, German, 107, 144, 241–242, 265. See also individual phi­los­o­phers philosophy, Greek, 271 philosophy, Italian, 107, 109, 128, 131, 410 philosophy, medieval, 201 philosophy, pious, 151 philosophy, Pythagorean, 429 philosophy of action, 150 philosophy of symbolic forms, 315 Phison, 398 Phoebus, 379, 392 Phoenix, Pico as, 9–18, 304, 451 phoibos, 392 physical character, 250 physics, Cartesian, 239 piagnone, 179 Pico, Enrico De Blais, 103 Pico, Galeotto, 78 Pico Boxes, 22, 91, 192–194, 201, 212–213, 265, 282, 298, 304 Pico della Mirandola, Gianfrancesco, 2, 12, 20, 21; Bartoli on, 241; Burckhardt

675

on, 83; death of, 14, 83; defense of Pico’s reputation, 168; defense of Savonarola, 167, 184; Ficino on, 181; publication of Pico’s letters, 162–164; publication of Pico’s writings, 162; as Savonarola’s biographer, 183–184; view of Pico, 164. See also Life (Pico) Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 9; appearance, 300–308; biographies of, 3, 260–261, 457; death of, 87, 181, 183, 193; epitaph of, 298; Italian view of, 105; lessons of, 456; life of learning, 16–17; in Miracle of the Sacrament, 301; misunderstanding of, 2; reception of ­a fter death, 4; reputation of, 231, 240, 241; scandals and, 179–180 (see also Margherita; papal condemnation); standard view of, 108; works of, 16, 17 (see also Apology; Disputations; Heptaplus; 900 Conclusions; Oration) Pico ­family genealogy, 12–16 Picus (god), 11 picus (woodpecker), 9, 10–12 Pietism / Pietists, 205, 223–224, 225–227, 229, 241, 246. See also Schwärmer / Schwärmerei Piety (S4), 345, 372, 400, 401, 489, 499 piety, Pico’s, 178. See also repentance /  reformation, Pico’s Pinker, Steven, 67–68 Pio ­family, 12 Pippa Passes (Browning), 289–290 Pistorius, Johann, 219 Pius X (pope), 150 plant, 488, 489. See also cutting off Plato, 203, 245, 247, 255, 264, 265, 267, 295, 321, 364, 378, 391, 404; on Aristotle, 410; concord with Aristotle, 201–202, 206, 275, 416, 446, 490; on death, 388; definition of philosophy, 161; dialogues, 360; five tests of virtue, 376; Ion, 363; magic and, 420, 423; Myth of the Cave, 148; numbers and, 418; Phaedo, 396; Phaedrus, 394; secrecy and, 435; theology of, 415; theory of learning, 179; in ­t heses / Oration, 353, 413–414, 418, 486, 492–493; Timaeus, 353, 360, 417; Tiraboschi on, 234; on truths, 415

676

Index

Platonic philosophy, allusions to, 372 Platonism, 312, 372, 373, 429; adaptation of Chaldean Oracles to, 426; Iamblichus, 360; magic and, 422–423; Pico’s, 256; Proclus’s mystical exposition of, 376; ­t heses on, 422–423 Platonists, 373, 414, 493 play, 253–254 plea­sure, 51, 252–254 Pletho, Gemistos, 208, 274 Pliny, 53, 362, 363, 396, 422, 423 Plotinus, 271, 347, 365, 373, 394, 397; on death, 388; dislike of body, 439; magic and, 420, 423–425; motivations of, 447; in ­t heses / Oration, 412, 414, 486; translation of, 286 Plutarch, 363, 377, 382, 390, 392, 393 poetry, Pico’s, 174–175, 190 politics: in Italy, 74, 323; Roman, 34–38 Poliziano (Angelo Ambrogini), 9, 10, 12, 17, 18, 85, 184, 203, 282–283, 294, 295, 344, 405; age of, 302; Ficino and, 181; humanism and, 154; in Miracle of the Sacrament, 301; on Pico as Phoenix, 451; Pico compared to, 310; Pico’s letters and, 187, 189 Pomona, 425 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 80, 219, 256, 264 Popularphilosophie, 228 Porphyry, 166, 330, 372, 373, 396–397, 426; Cave of the Nymphs, 423; demonology, 421; love and, 426–427; on magic, 424; in ­t heses / Oration, 414 positivism, 138, 140, 153, 309 possessions, 378 Postel, Guillaume, 207, 245, 246, 284 power, 81–83, 385 Pozzetti, Pompilio, 241 praestantia, 28, 48, 49, 50 Praxiteles, 53 prayers, 174, 368, 372, 387, 396 Preis (price), 24–25, 29, 158, 248 prepon, 37 Pre-­Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), 288, 292, 308 Presence of God, 399. See also Dwelling Prester John, 442 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 93

price (Preis), 24–25, 29, 158, 248 pro­cession, 379, 500 Proclus, 271, 330, 344, 360, 364, 372, 373, 376, 377, 379, 390, 395, 396, 417, 444; on concord, 418; interpretations of Orphic Hymns, 448; mystical exposition of Platonism, 376; in t­ heses / Oration, 414, 486–487 pro­gress, 46, 156, 200, 202, 204, 209, 214, 239, 240, 242, 263, 319, 324, 327 proj­ect, Pico’s, 361 prolusione, 108, 319, 334 prophecy, 347, 439 propositions, Pico’s. See 900 Conclusions (Pico); t­ heses, Pico’s Protestantism, 269. See also Reformation Proteus, 362, 363–364 Proverbs, 396 providence, 270, 380 Psalms, 431, 446 psy­chol­ogy, 362, 370, 440 publishers, 114, 321, 323. See also Vallardi (publishing h ­ ouse); Vallecchi (publishing ­house) Pugin, Augustus Welby, 288, 289 Purest Wine (S10), 498 purgatory, Pico in, 167, 184 purification, 360, 394 purity, 392, 398 Pyrrhonists, 205 Pythagoras, 357, 364, 365, 389, 395, 416, 417, 498; numbers and, 418; Pico’s knowledge of, 414; Protrepticus, 414; secrecy and, 435; in t­ heses, 419 Pythagorean arithmetic theology, 446 Pythagorean friendship, 395 Pythagorean Life, ἀ e, 414 Pythagorean philosophy, 429 qeshot, 398 Quattrocento, 32, 72, 234 queen, 386 quodlibets, 407 Rabelais, François, 77 rahamanut, 398 Ralbag (Levi ben Gerson; Gersonides), 342, 380–382, 383, 388



Index

Rambam (Maimonides, Moses), 339, 341, 342, 347, 348, 359, 380, 384, 388, 438, 439, 443, 501 Ramus, Peter, 155, 207, 265 Randall, John Herman, 318–320 Raphael (angel), 398, 399, 402, 403, 422, 425 Raphael (artist), 263, 292, 305, 408 rapture, 30. See also enthusiasm; Schwärmer / Schwärmerei Rashba (Shlomo ben Abraham ibn Adret), 342, 343 Rashbi (Shimon ben Yohai), 437, 443 Rashi (Shlomo ben Isaac), 386, 401 rationalists, Cartesian, 211–212 rationality, 56 ravvivare, 234 Reade, Charles, 297 realism, 86 real­ity, 112, 137, 140 reason, 241–242, 243, 244, 246, 248, 256, 257, 318 rebirth, 241, 382 Recanati, Menahem, 343, 349, 351, 379, 385, 386, 431, 439 Redeemer, 42, 122, 354, 355, 448, 498 Reformation, 263, 265, 269, 271 Reformation, Catholic, 129 Reformers, 270 regimen, 377, 395 regnum hominis (Kingdom of Man), 109, 110, 119, 120, 125, 131 Reimarus, Hermann, 243 Reinhold, Karl, 243, 255 Reisch, Gregor, 219 religion: Burckhardt on, 90; critical study of, 229; in E ­ ngland, 292; French philosophy and, 150; Hegel on, 264; individuals and, 78–79; Kant on, 246–247; natu­ral, 243; philosophy and, 246–247; Pico’s, Greswell on, 283; in Re­nais­ sance, 78–80; revealed, 243; Schleiermacher on, 266; Schwärmerei and, 246; subversion of, 88 remaining, 379, 500 remez, 399 Re­nais­sance, 2; as Age of Erudition, 210; collapse of, 77; data about, 281; dignitas

677

and, 31–34, 55; in En­glish lit­er­a­ture, 280–281; Garin on, 124; harmonies revived by, 122; Hegel on, 263, 264; invention of, 29, 91; Italian, notion of, 91; Italian view of, 72–73; Jaucourt on, 210; morality in, 76–78; naming of, 71; philosophy in, 319; Pico and, 58; popu­lar image of, 156; pre­sent sense of term, 280–281; relation with classicism, 75; religion in, 78–80; Symonds on, 285; Tennemann’s critical history of, 256; in textbooks, 275; ­women in, 76 Re­nais­sance Studies, field of, 311 Renascence, 281, 291 renasci, 281 repentance / reformation, Pico’s, 164, 185. See also penitence / penances reputation, Pico’s, 231, 240, 241 Reshit (Beginning; S2), 385, 402, 499 re­spect, 25. See also dignity Rest, 379 resurgence, 237 Reuchlin, Johann, 194, 208, 219, 223, 258, 260, 266, 275 reunion, 500 revenge, 77, 81 reversion, 379, 487, 500 rhe­toric, 36, 346 ricer, 234 richiamare, 234 Rigg, James, 284–285 rinascere, 234 rinascimento, 72 risorgere, 234 Risorgimento (po­liti­cal movement), 95, 96 Risorgimento (Re­nais­sance), 4, 6, 72, 95, 237 ritornare, 234 Ritter, Heinrich, 266–269, 272, 273, 274, 282 river of knowledge, 438 rivers of Eden, 398, 399, 400, 489 rivestire, 234 robes, 390. See also garments; skins; vestments Romanitas, 147 Romanticism, German, 266 Roscoe, William, 281, 287–288, 292, 298, 309

678

Index

Rosicrucians, 205, 221, 258 Rosmini, Antonio, 109, 138 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 64, 156, 236 Rucellai, Bernardo, 295, 296 Ruskin, John, 288, 291–292, 308 Sabbadini, Remigio, 72, 73 Sabbath, 379, 445 sacraments, 377, 491 sages, 342, 349, 350, 359, 360, 407, 408, 417, 420, 488–489 saints, influence on Life, 166. See also hagiography / hagiographies Saitta, Giuseppe, 113, 114, 119–120, 316 Salmon, Yehuda, 342 salvation, 40, 41, 43, 89, 412 Samael, 404, 433 saraf, 369 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 134, 135, 136, 142–143, 145, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153, 156, 158 Satan, 352, 500 Savonarola, Girolamo, 78, 83, 88, 164, 165, 178, 180, 181, 191, 198, 273, 280, 294, 309, 310; Burckhardt on, 87; in Essai sur les moeurs, 214; execution of, 78; Gianfrancesco and, 167, 183–184; hatred of astrology, 211; in Life, 166; Naudé on, 211; Pico and, 167, 184, 313; Voltaire on, 215–216. See also Florence scandals, Pico’s, 179–180, 187. See also abduction of Margherita; papal condemnation Schedel, Hartman, 18, 22 Schiller, Friedrich, 5, 134, 147, 251, 253 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 266, 267 scholarship on Pico, 107. See also Anagnine, Eugenio; Gentile, Giovanni; Papini, Giovanni; Semprini, Giovanni scholasticism / scholastics, 155, 204, 207, 256, 264, 312, 315, 316, 318, 319, 342, 412 Scholem, Gershom, 115, 335 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 30, 31, 274 Schwärmer / Schwärmerei, 195, 216, 224, 225, 227, 228–229, 230, 240, 242, 243, 244–247, 248, 256, 257, 259, 260, 261, 265, 266, 267, 275, 284. See also enthusiasm scibilis, 199

science, 62, 326 scientia Shemot, 437 Scotists, 412, 416 Scotus, John Duns, 202, 411, 412, 416, 418, 490 scripture, 229, 339–342 Seal of Solomon, 433 secrecy / secrets, 314, 344, 429, 430, 434–436. See also Kabbalah; Law secret of 72, 433 sects, in E ­ ngland, 225 secularism, 66, 162. See also humanism Seebohm, Frederic, 285 Sefer Ge’ullah, 335 Sefirah / Sefirot, 345, 349, 350, 351, 368, 437–438, 496, 501; above S10, 431; God revealed in, 346; God’s names as titles of, 445; magic and, 422; omitted from Oration, 430; production of, 398; S1, 359, 375, 379, 387, 402, 432, 444, 445; S1a, 345; S1b, 345, 389; S2, 359, 372, 379, 385, 387, 389, 399, 401, 402, 444, 445; S3, 379, 385, 386, 387, 389, 399, 401, 402, 444, 445; S4, 345, 371, 372, 381, 383, 389, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 404; S4–10, 385, 430, 488, 489, 500; S5, 371, 372, 389, 399, 401, 402, 403; S6, 350, 352, 371, 372, 381, 384, 386, 389, 399, 401, 402, 432, 444, 445; S7, 389, 401; S8, 389, 401; S9, 355, 356, 383, 385, 389, 444; S10, 347, 350, 352, 356, 379, 385, 386, 387, 389, 391, 399, 401, 402, 431, 432, 440, 441, 444, 445; sexuality among, 438; soul’s climb through, 356 Selden, John, 223 self, extinction of, 172, 348, 361, 384, 388, 397, 403. See also body; flesh self-­construction, 142 self-­creation, 149. See also autoctisis self-­determination, 262 self-­esteem, 25. See also dignity selfishness, 77 seligere, 203 Semprini, Giovanni, 105, 107, 109, 113, 114, 121 Seneca, 59, 61, 415 sensism, 138 sensual experience, substituted for values, 286



Index

separation, 347 Serafim, 370, 381 Seraphim, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 376. See also angels Sestius, Lucius Publius, 34 Severus, Sulpicius, 166 sex, 51, 189–190, 249, 356. See also intercourse, sacred Sextus Afranius Burrhus, 58–59 sexuality, 349, 386, 438, 440 Sforza ­family, 81–82, 83 Shabbat (S10), 379, 445 Shaddai, 440, 441 sham (­t here), 398 shamayim (heavens), 371, 381 Shekinah (She Who Dwells; S10), 347, 350, 352, 368, 379, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 391, 399, 401, 402, 440, 441 shem / shemot (Name / Names), 350, 398, 437, 496 sheqel, 341–342 Shield of David, 433 Shimon ben Laqis, Rabbi, 341 Shmuel bin Nissim Abulfaraj (Farachio). See Flavius Mithridates Sigwart, Christoph, 269–271, 274 Silber, Eucharius, 339, 405, 501 Silenus, 392 similitudo (likeness), 39, 42, 351 Simon, Richard, 220, 222 Simon Magus, 428 Simon of Trent (Santo Simonino), 98, 99, 100–101 Simplicius, 413 sin, 50, 176, 367 Sismondi, J. C. L., 288 Sistine Chapel, 30, 55 Sisto da Siena, 217–218, 222–223 Sixtus IV (pope), 355, 430, 441 skepticism, 243 Skinner, B. F., 59–67 skins, 390, 494 Social Catechism, 236 society, as art, 76 Socrates, 153, 161, 242, 364, 368, 373, 376, 377, 388, 390, 393–394, 395, 396, 423 sod, 399 sodomy, 350, 489. See also homo­sexuality

679

Soffici, Ardengo, 93, 122 Solomon (Biblical figure), 189, 359 Son (in Christian theology), 39, 365, 379, 402, 432, 444, 445, 497, 499. See also Trinity Son (S2), 379 Son (S6), 445 Song of Songs, 344, 388, 399 sophistry, in Apology, 405 sophrosunê, 37 sorcery, 421. See also magic soul: apart from flesh, 353; ascent of, 366; as bride, 387; hands / feet and, 378; magic and, 424; Manetti on, 52; Michael and, 371; need to separate from body, 254; Oration on, 249, 254; relation with body, 254; terms for, 47; in t­ heses, 486, 489, 490, 491, 494; threefold character of, 40, 41; transmigration of, 364, 383; triangular image of, 376; turning into angels and, 26; unity with God, 272. See also ascent sources, Pico’s, 358 South (S4), 345, 371, 399, 400, 401, 402, 489, 509 Southern ­Water, 489 Spagnoli, Battista, 186, 188, 189 Spaventa, Bertrando, 107–108, 112, 138, 139, 316 Spener, Philipp, 225, 229, 246 sphere, 500, 518 sphinx, 369, 435 Spinoza, Baruch, 156, 157, 229, 242, 243 Spirit, 111–112, 137, 262–264 Spirito, Ugo, 142, 152 spirits (daimones), 421 spiritual weapons, 172, 177 spirituality, Pico as paragon of, 197 Stanley, Thomas, 200–201, 202, 261 Starke, Mariana, 297, 309 state (po­liti­cal), 73–74, 82, 263 Sternberg, burning of Jews in, 18, 19, 23 Stoicism, 37, 187, 265 Strasbourg, 159 Strauss, David, 269 Strauss, Leo, 5, 321 Strozzi, Ercole, 298 Studia Humanitatis, 123

680

Index

Studies of the Warburg Library, 313 Sturm, Johann, 204 subject, 88, 140, 143 subject / object distinction, 326 sublime, Kant’s, 252 substance, 147, 370 sullam (ladder), 378 sumbola, 395 Sun, 396 sunkretismos, 204 superstition, 248; Burckhardt on, 88–89; eclectics and, 217; erudition and, 79; Heumann on, 207; Pico’s opposition to, 267; strug­gle against, modernity and, 90; sustained by classical revival, 90 Swedenborg, Emanuel / Swedenborgians, 216, 217, 229, 245 Sylvius, Aeneas, 79 symbolism, 313 symbols, 252–253, 314 Symonds, J. A., 285–286, 310, 311, 320, 322, 327 syncretism / syncretists, 115, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 228, 239, 257, 415 Synesius, 372, 394, 395, 425 Tabernacle, 388, 389–390, 392, 436, 494 Talmud, 343, 408 Targum, 365, 377 taxonomy, 155 temperance, 37 ten Hove, Nicolaas, 281, 282 Tennemann, Wilhelm, 26, 28, 30, 73, 240, 255–258, 261, 262, 265, 266, 269, 270, 271, 274, 320, 322 Terah (Biblical figure), 383, 400 testimonia of Pico, 181–182 tetractys, 376, 432, 433, 434 Tetragrammaton, 340, 368 textbooks, 321, 452–453 theism, 80, 89, 90, 225 Themistius, 188, 365, 413, 486 then, 498 theologians, in ­t heses / Oration, 357, 411 theology, 436, 490; concord on, 490; in Hermetica, 330; late medieval debates about, 411; lower, 438; magic as, 420; moral, 317; natu­ral, 392, 406, 428;

Neoplatonic, 379; in Oration, 438; Orphic, 417; perfect being, 361; Pico’s, 284, 411; poetic, 373, 408; Pythagorean arithmetic, 446; as regimen, 377; relation with philosophy, 317, 404; revealed, 428; in t­ heses, 491 theôrêtikos, 438 theôria, 438 theosophists, 351 theosophy, 349, 438, 444 ­t heses, Pico’s, 413; about concord, 417; about innovation, 417; about Plotinus, 412; part B, 419; code for tracking, 341; condemnation of (see Innocent VIII (pope); papal condemnation of Pico’s ­t heses); defense of (see Apology); demons in, 411; disclaimer in, 413; final 72, 346, 350, 351, 446; first-­person statements in, 413; on Giles, 411; Hermetic, 416; Kabbalah and, 341, 350–351, 416, 417, 418, 421, 437–439; magic and, 417, 421–422, 423, 425, 427, 428; on mathe­ matics, 411; Muslim thinkers in, 412; number of, 404, 431; organ­i zation of, 409–410, 414, 417, 427; Orphic, 431; phi­los­o­phers in, 418–419; on Platonism, 422–423; schools of philosophy in, 415; set 3, 419; set 4, 419; 600, 417; Trinity in, 444–445; on Zoroaster, 448. See also 900 Conclusions (Pico) theurgia, 421 theurgy, 346, 373, 377, 383, 426, 427 Thirty-­Two Paths, 500 Thomasius, Christian, 204–205, 206, 217, 223, 225, 226, 227–228, 229; ­W hether Heresy Is a Crime, 227 Thomasius, Jakob, 204 Thomists, 412, 416 Thorndike, Lynn, 323–324, 327 Thought (Knowledge; S1b), 345 thought, freedom of, 257 thought thinking, 132, 137, 141, 149, 152 Throne, God’s, 377, 438–439 Thrones (angels), 368, 369, 370, 372, 376. See also angels thunderbirds, 10 Tiedemann, Dieterich, 258–259, 261, 262 Tiferet, 352, 385, 386, 489, 501



Index

Tigris, 398 Time (god), 447 time, metaphysics, 314 Timothy (Biblical figure), youth of, 406 Tiraboschi, Girolamo, 232–235, 236 Titans, 379 Tito (fictional character), 295–296 Tobias (Biblical figure), 403, 425 Tobit (Biblical figure), 403 tohu, 381 toleration, religious, 107 tourism, 297–303 tradition, 61 Traherne, Thomas, 195, 200 tranquillitas, 38 transcendence, 272 transient individuations, 132 translations, 442. See also Flavius Mithridates transmigration, 383. See also metempsychosis transposition, 352 travel guides, 299, 300, 303, 308 tree, 345, 350, 398, 402 Tree of Knowledge (S10), 349–350, 369, 488 Tree of Life (S6), 350, 369 triads, divine, 414 Triagrammaton, 352, 489 triangle, 492 Trinities, triad of, 429, 444 Trinity, 40, 41, 375, 379, 430, 497, 499; concealed by Jewish theosophy, 444; proof of, 414, 427; in t­ heses, 444–445. See also Christ trinity (non-­Christian), 379, 432, 486, 487 Trithemius, Johann, 19–20, 21, 22 Trollope, Anthony, 56, 297 truth (veritas), 38, 415 turning-­toward, 313 Understanding (S3), 347, 385, 387, 388, 389, 402, 430, 442, 443, 501 ­union, mystical, 224, 325, 362, 427 ­union / unity, 331–332, 350, 361, 362 United Nations Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights, 31, 56–57 universal law, 25 Ur, 400

681

Uriel (angel), 399 utilitas, 36, 38 Valla, Lorenzo, 101, 294, 312 Vallardi (publishing ­house), 128, 130–131, 134, 143 Vallecchi (publishing ­house), 133, 136, 144, 149, 150, 152 value (Wert), 25 value (Würde), 257 values, 62, 286, 313 Van Helmont, Francis Mercury, 257 Vanini, Giulio Cesare, 221, 265 Vasari, Giorgio, 192, 303 Vasoli, Cesare, 132–133 vehicle, 390, 423, 438, 447, 493 veil, 389 vendetta / vengeance, 77, 81 venustas, 36, 37, 38 Vergil, 11, 408 vestments, 390 Ve-­zot li-­Yehud (Abulafia), 342, 343, 349, 378, 381, 389, 436 vileness (vilitas), 41, 43, 44 Villari, Pasquale, 308–310 vio­lence, 67–68 virtue / virtues, 35, 187, 213, 238, 260, 361, 376, 394, 397, 410, 420, 428, 486 virtuosity, 81 Visconti, Filippo Maria, 82 visioning, 438, 439 visual material, 5. See also images; Pico Boxes Vita (Pico). See Life (Pico) Voigt, Georg, 72, 73, 281 Volksgeister, 263, 264 la volonté voulante, 150 la volonté voulue, 150 Voltaire, 6, 157, 209, 211–216, 230, 231, 241, 281, 284, 299, 310, 453 Voss, Johann (Vossius), 202–203 vowels, 439 un vrai Pic, 453–454 Vulgate Bible, 396 Waldron, Jeremy, 67–68 Walker, D. P., 323 Walpole, Horace, 287

682

Index

Warburg, Aby, 299, 313, 315, 324–326, 327 Warburg Institute, 323–324, 327, 328 ­water (mayim), 371, 381, 501 ­Water (S4), 345, 371, 381, 489, 501 ­waters of life, 398. See also rivers of Eden Waugh, Evelyn, 57, 60 weapons for spiritual b ­ attle, Pico’s, 172, 260 Weber, Max, 56, 325 Weigel, Valentin, 205, 207 Wert (value), 24–25, 29, 248 West (S10), 399 Western civilization, course in, 452–453 whirlwind, 371 Wiedergeburt, 72, 241 ­w ill, 326 William of Auvergne, 422, 423 William of Paris, 493 willing ­w ill, 150 Winckelmann, Johann, 147, 254, 286 Windelband, Wilhelm, 274–275 Wirszubski, Chaim, 1, 2, 110, 118, 120, 334–336, 357, 432, 452 Wisdom (S2), 359, 365, 372, 379, 385, 387, 389, 400, 401, 402, 430, 444, 497, 499, 500 wisdom (sapienza), 126, 372, 423 witchcraft, 365–366, 406. See also magic; superstition Wizenmann, Thomas, 244 Wolf, Johann, 222 Wolff , Christian, 153, 205–206, 228, 229, 264 Wolgemut, Michael, 23 ­women: dignitas and, 38; in Germany, 226; missing, 387; in Re­nais­sance, 76 woodpecker (picus), 9, 10–12

world, withdrawal from, 260, 376, 407. See also asceticism worth, personal, 65 wound-­worms, 230 wretchedness (miseria), 43–45 Würde, 24, 26, 28–29, 31, 50, 248, 249, 250, 257. See also dignity Würde des Menschen, 268–269 Yah, 353 Yates, Frances, 2, 314, 323, 326–329, 332, 333, 452 Yates thesis, 327–328 Yearbook for Intellectual Tradition, 148 Yesu, 352 YHWH (S6), 340, 378, 433, 439, 445 “you are,” 393 youth, 406, 407, 412. See also age Zabarella, Jacopo, 312 zachar, 385 zahab, 385 Zalmoxis, 423 zeh (this), 354–355, 498 Zeller, Eduard, 266, 269, 270, 271, 274 Zerubabbel, 434 Zeus, 10–11, 372 Zevi, Shabbatai, 223 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus von, 229, 230, 246 Zohar, 217, 336, 342, 343, 344, 349, 350, 351, 354, 362, 366, 368, 383, 385, 387, 389, 390, 391, 399, 401, 406, 437, 443, 498 Zoroaster, 207, 357, 365, 390, 393, 397, 398, 399, 400, 414, 423, 426, 446, 447, 448, 487, 494, 498 Zorzi (Giorgio), Francesco, 208, 219, 266 zot (this; S10), 344, 354, 387 Zwingli, Ulrich, 269, 270–271, 274