He vowed ‘to swear allegiance to no creed, to plumb the depth of every philosopher, to scrutinise every scrap of paper, and to master every kind of thought’. He was committed to ‘not only the understanding of all existing knowledge but to go somewhat further than that’.
The 15th century scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola makes an ideal focus for The Grammar of Angels, Edward Wilson-Lee’s rich exploration of the philosophy of the Florentine Renaissance.
Best known for his Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has become known as the ‘Manifesto of the Renaissance’, a rapturous vision of the capacity of humankind to access and ascend toward the transcendent, Pico is an archetype of the philosopher-poet.
His reportedly angelic countenance (he may be the beatific figure staring out of the canvas in Raphael’s School of Athens), evident passion for knowledge, indifference to wealth (he gave away his inherited fortune) and willingness to challenge authority were consistent with his high-flown philosophy.
A passage from The Life of Pico written shortly after his death, translated here by Sir Thomas More, describes Pico as ‘of feature and shape seemly and beauteous, of stature, goodly and high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage lovely and fair, his colour white, intermingled with comely reds, his eyes grey, and quick of look, his teeth white and even, his hair yellow and abundant’.
Walter Pater writes in The Renaissance that:
Above all, we have a constant sense in reading him, that his thoughts, however little their positive value may be, are connected with springs beneath them of deep and passionate emotion; and when he explains the grades or steps by which the soul passes from the love of a physical object to the love of unseen beauty, and unfolds the analogies between this process and other movements upward of human thought, there is a glow and vehemence in his words which remind one of the manner in which his own brief existence flamed itself away.
His early death in 1494 at the age of just 31 only embellishes the legend.
The ultimate book launch
Pico believed all efforts to understand the world, whether through religion, philosophy or the arts have a common inspiration. All wisdom, ‘passed from Barbarians to the Greeks and from the Greeks to us’, testifies that the visible world is an analogue of the invisible, suffused with signs and oracles of the divine.
The Oration, written in 1486, was designed to introduce Pico’s first major statement of his philosophy, the 900 Theses, for which he planned the ultimate book launch. After delivering the Oration before the college of cardinals in Rome, the Western world’s religious and intellectual centre, the young scholar, then 24 years old, would defend the claims of the Theses against all-comers through a series of public discourses.
Pico intended the publication of the Theses to mark nothing less than a turn in humanity’s self-understanding; to show that the universal quest for understanding flowed from a common stream
With a due sense of theatre he proposed to deliver his great speech and commence the disputations that would follow on the Feast of Epiphany, the day when the wise men had come to Bethlehem to worship Christ, symbolising the reconciliation of earthly and divine knowledge.
The Theses consisted of 900 propositions, the first 400 by philosophers and sages from across the ages, the second 500 presenting Pico’s own formulations. The 400 sought to pick out the golden thread of humanity’s collective effort to understand the world, starting with contemporary thinkers and working backwards in time, through the medieval schoolmen to the Islamic falsafa, and from the philosophers of Greece and Rome to the wisdom traditions of the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, and the Hebrew sages. As Pico’s fellow scholar Marsilio Ficino put it
[T]hrough the wish of divine Providence to attract to itself in wondrous fashion all men in accordance with their intellectual ability, it came about that a religious philosophy arose long ago among the Persians thanks to Zoroaster and among the Egyptians thanks to Hermes, without any discrepancy between the two. The doctrine was then sustained among the Thracians under Orpheus, but it was finally consummated at Athens by the divine Plato.
Pico acknowledged differences and even outright contradictions between the first 400 propositions, which were put side-by-side rather than presented according to some linear development. But he insisted that all were true ‘according to their own manner’. Wilson-Lee suggests that the Theses might be understood as ‘a series of superimposed levels of reality emanating from the first things on down, enriching the universe in which we live with a near limitless depth, like a palimpsest on which each of these ways of being have been painted one on top of the other, and which the adept soul could navigate as steps on a ladder.’
Connections between these ways could be discerned because all shared an intuition that the destination of all things tended towards their source, the ‘One’, the ground of all multiplicity.
Religious ceremony, from shamanistic ritual to the most elaborate performances of the Mass sought to access a reality that could only be approached through formal liturgies, or even patterns of sound beyond formal sense, such as recitation and chanting. Songs and poetry, from the dithyrambs of Dionysus to the lyre of Apollo, were driven by the same impulse.
For Pico this elevated language bore traces of ‘the grammar of angels’, those mysterious figures he suggested all cultures posited as intermediaries between man and the divine:
If we want to be the companions of angels, speaking our way up and down Jacob’s ladder, virtue alone will not be enough, unless we have been instructed in how to move from level to level as the rites demand, never leaving the ladder.
Following Plato Pico saw the soul as a charioteer attempting to steer flying horses, to ride the irrational to access the rational, turning, as Wilson-Lee puts it ‘the mystic, irrational and ecstatic impulses of Greek culture against themselves, using them as models of an eternal beyond which was better accessed by the rational mind’.
By doing so the soul ascends from earthly to invisible beauty, opening out on to the world’s essential Oneness, thereby proving man’s vocation as, in Pico’s words, ‘the go-between of creation, intimate with those above and master of those below, a waystation between the stillness of eternity and the flood of time.’
Pico’s system began to break down as he attempted to articulate the soul’s ultimate destiny. He wrote lyrical passages speaking of an ecstatic state of unity a blissful dissolution of the individual self into the One:
Stung by unspeakable desire, we will be driven to ecstasy, moving beyond our bodies like burning Seraphim, and full of divinity we shall be ourselves no longer, but rather we will be Him, the One who made us.
But the logician in him was not content to allow the trail of his thought to be lost in a fog of mysticism. A subsequent work, the Heptaplus, puzzled over how two separate things the soul and the One could become a new thing:
Our greatest felicity, is to attain this fluid and angelic state, just as it is plainly the final happiness of drops of water to reach the ocean, which is the fullness of the waters; so for our happiness … we must be joined someday to the first intellect and the first mind of all, which is the fullness and totality of all understanding.
Another essay, On Being and the One, suggested the One should be understood as the condition of all being. Just as the concept of ‘whiteness’ is not itself white but the condition for anything being white, the One does not exist but is the concept of existence.
On the index before the Index
But however so refined, Pico’s universalist philosophy had arrived at something quite different from Christian orthodoxy. It presented Christian theology as but one path in the universal quest for the One, rather than the definitive revelation of God’s truth.
And the Church noticed. As the nature of Pico’s philosophy and the scope of his ambitions became clearer the Vatican suspended his plans for a great disputation while the Theses were examined for heresy.
His speculations regarding the soul’s ultimate destiny in the ocean of Oneness were found to be contrary to the Church’s belief in the free will of the individual soul. And his assertion that ‘it is not within the free power of man to believe things to be true just because it pleases him to do so, and to believe other things to be false just because it pleases him to do so’ challenged the Church’s prerogative to assert, without obligation of defence, that Christian doctrine rests on the acceptance of certain mysteries.
Pico’s initial defiance culminated in the Theses becoming the first work to suffer a universal ban by the Vatican, anticipating the Index of Forbidden Books introduced during the Counter-Reformation.
After fleeing Rome when the gravity of his persistent refusal to recant dawned on him – Giordano Bruno, a later theorist in Pico’s lineage, was burnt at the stake – he was eventually able to return to Italy under the protection of Lorenzo de’ Medici. He lived for some years in idyllic conditions in the hills overlooking Florence along with Ficino and another poet scholar, Angelo Poliziano, before Lorenzo’s death exposed him again to the turbulent political conditions of the age.
Pico and Poliziano both died in mysterious circumstances when the Medici family was pushed out of Florence under the influence of the ascetic Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola.
A 2007 exhumation intended to solve the riddle found a toxic quantity of arsenic in Pico’s bones. It may have been administered at the command of Lorenzo’s son Piero, who was said to resent the philosopher’s closeness to Savonarola. Pico admired the priest’s fierce oratory and was resident at Savonarola’s convent San Marco in Florence when he died. But by the investigators’ own admission the evidence was inconclusive: in those days arsenic was also used as a medicine.
Wilson-Lee’s book concerned with Pico’s intellectual life doesn’t dwell on the affair: an entirely different kind of book could have been written about the colourful outward circumstances of his subject’s outward life.
But he is keen to underline those exotic qualities of Pico’s thought that seem alien to us.
Pico the Magus
Most obviously Pico believed in what we would call magic, the concealed powers of ancient texts to reveal nature’s secrets. He was particularly fascinated by the Hebrew Kabbalah and late classical hermetic writers such as Hermes Trismegistus. But he sought to draw such mysteries into the light, drawing a sharp distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ magic. The magus could only use hermetic lore to understand the world not direct it. An influential passage in the Oration asserted that:
As the one magic exposes and enslaves man to unclean power, the other makes him the lord and prince. 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 … This magic makes public, as if it were the Artificer, wonders concealed in the world 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 things below to properties and powers of those above.
Pico was also much less inhibited than the modern scholar in drawing connections between past and present cultures. In his enthusiasm to trace an unbroken line of thought to antiquity he could pass over radical differences between worldviews, interpreting ancient writings in light of the assumptions of his own day.
And writing before philosophy’s subjective turn, he was more ready to suppose that we have direct access to a transcendent realm. Although his nature mysticism in certain respects anticipates the Romantics, they saw the transcendent through the lens of Kant’s limits on human understanding. Though the Romantic poet encounters the Sublime, he does so within the bounds of human subjectivity, battering against walls of subjective experience that cannot be broken.
And yet the figure of Pico, and the force of his vision of a world ordered towards beauty, exert their pull across the centuries. As Plato in the Phaedrus, a key Renaissance text, he ‘saw beauty shining in brightness’ and ‘beheld the beatific vision … shining in pure light’.
It is significant that he agonised over the implications of his speculations regarding the soul’s absorption in Oneness, a loss of individual perspective that, however rapturously described, is a kind of death.
Wilson-Lee, like Pico’s other modern biographers, is sceptical about the moralising tone of the Life, keen to press the narrative that the errant scholar turned towards orthodoxy towards the end of his life. The evidence is equivocal. But we might wonder whether such a vivacious and proud soul as Pico’s might not have had doubts about asserting its own dissolution.
To that extent at least the Church might have been correct in its assessment of the vector of Pico’s philosophy. After all, what light is there to see if there is no self to see it?