“He lived with such intensity that people have stayed fascinated by him. They’ve told his story over and over again–for different reasons and in different ways.”
-from Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory (2019) by Professor Brian Copenhaver
It would not be an exaggeration to call Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola one of the most fascinating and elusive personalities of the early modern age. In his short-lived, thirty-one-year life, Pico was many things: a poet, an orator, a scholar of the Kabbalah, a student of astrology, a supporter of the fiery-tongued preacher Girolamo Savonarola, and a friend of the Platonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Today, however, he is best known for his Oration (1496), an esoteric text that–like cave crystals in torchlight–dazzles and disorients. Composed to introduce Pico’s Conclusions (1486), a collection of 900 theses on a range of topics, the Oration offers readers scintillations of the count’s enigmatic but many-splendoured “poetic theology”.
Pico was famous during and after his lifetime, but some interpreters of the Oration gave him a series of interesting and–at times–semi-mythical afterlives. Although he did not become, like the legendised Virgil, a trickster-like wizard, he was cast as a hero of human dignity, prowess, and ambition. Yet, according to Brian Copenhaver, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and History at The University of California, Los Angeles, the real Pico wanted to promote an ascetic lifestyle that was “incompatible” with human-centred goals. “Far from celebrating the human condition,” Copenhaver writes in his new book, Magic and the Dignity of Man, “he mapped a way out of it.” We spoke with Professor Copenhaver to learn more about Pico, his intellectual background, and his interpreters.
The Custodian: For years, Giovanni Pico was touted as a standard-bearer and prophet of human dignity. Yet, as you’ve described in your new book, the “real” Pico wanted to map his way out of the human condition rather than celebrate it. Which persons and intellectual trends most contributed to the creation and popularisation of the “false” Pico?
Professor Brian Copenhaver: Speakers of European languages have used words related to the English “dignity” ever since ancient Romans bragged about their dignitas–mainly as “rank” or “status” that only male citizens (not women, children or slaves) could gain or lose. Many centuries later, Immanuel Kant thought of dignity (Würde) in a different way–as belonging always to all humans (not just males) intrinsically (not acquired from elsewhere), inalienably (never gained or lost) and incomparably: all humans always have it, and no one has more or less of it. Kant’s followers noticed the word dignitas in the title of Pico’s (now) famous Oration: they did not notice that dignitas had been added by an editor ten years after Pico died. This led German Kantians and Romantics to attribute Kant’s Würde to Pico–an anachronism that inspired Jacob Burckhardt to advertise this mistake about the Oration after 1860: since that time, no book about the Renaissance has had a larger audience than Burckhardt’s.
One influential reader was Giovanni Gentile, Italy’s best philosopher in his day and the architect of Fascist cultural projects after 1924–until he was assassinated by anti-Fascists twenty years later. Before Gentile sided with Mussolini, he had adopted Burckhardt’s conception of ‘humanism,’ with Pico as its icon, but he adapted Burckhardt’s Romantic individualism to his own Kantian-Hegelian system, called “actual idealism”. When Gentile joined the Fascist regime as a leading official, he brought his philosophy with him, supplying an ideology for Italian students of Pico until after WWII. Gentile was aware of Pico’s Kabbalah, but he ignored it, making Jewish mysticism forbidden territory for his most rabid lackeys–especially Giovanni Papini, the first Director (under Mussolini) of Italy’s National Institute for Renaissance Studies, now a distinguished international centre.
The young Eugenio Garin–a later Director of the Institute and universally admired as an eminent authority on the Renaissance–was a protégé of Gentile’s in the 1930s. In 1937 Garin published the book about Pico, never revised or translated, that still sets the standard: Garin also worked for Papini during WWII. Although Garin devoted two chapters of his book to Kabbalah, he devalued its role in Pico’s thought while re-stating Gentile’s conception of the Oration as “humanist”–meaning something like “progressive”, though from a Fascist point of view. He diminished the role of Kabbalah, a large topic in the Oration, and exaggerated Pico’s interest in texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, never named in the Oration. Frances Yates, a powerful voice in the Anglophone world for Garin’s views, outdid him in inflating the importance of the Hermetica–not just for Pico but for Quattrocento Italy in general, where Pico lived his brief life and died.
C: When was Pico first introduced to Arabo-Judaic mysticism?
BP: In the early 1480s, a very young Pico–born in 1463–was tutored by two learned Jews: Elia del Medigo was a serious philosopher; Flavius Mithridates, a convert who worked for the Pope, was a clever, flamboyant and prolific forger.
Pico studied with Elia at the University of Padua as an expert on Averroes (d. 1198). The best-known Muslim philosopher among Christians, Averroes was a contemporary of Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) – a Jew who wrote in Arabic and shared the Muslim’s commitment to Aristotle. Elia, a Jew who wrote in Latin, continued to teach Pico while his student’s main project was the notorious 900 Conclusions, published at the end of 1486. Several dozen conclusions are about Averroes, centered on his Aristotelian psychology. But Pico got this material indirectly from Elia’s commentaries on Averroes, which depended on Hebrew and Arabic texts inaccessible to Christians. Since Elia disliked Kabbalah, Pico learned nothing about it from this doctrinaire Averroist.
In one dimension, Elia’s lessons were a psychology of cognition–how immaterial human minds get likenesses of things from experience of the material world. In another dimension, he taught a theology of conjunction: how some embodied mortals escape their bodies and ascend to merge with an unbodied God. When this remote and exalted God came near the lower world of matter, he acted as the Agent Intellect (AI). The AI was the dynamo both of Elia’s psychology of cognition and of his theology of conjunction. According to the psychology, human persons never really think; instead, the AI thinks in them. Since human individuals are not fully rational, lost identities are no great loss when humans conjoin with the Godhead in order to be saved.
Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher, applied this same psychology and theology of the Agent Intellect to interpret the Torah and Talmud. Abraham Abulafia (d. 1291), a Spanish Jew, wrote commentaries on Maimonides and applied the great Rabbi’s theories to personal adventures of ecstatic, out-of-body ascent. Pico’s other Jewish tutor, aka Flavius, translated dozens of books by Abulafia and other Kabbalists. Flavius not only supplied Pico with this Jewish arcana, he also doctored the texts to make them look like Christian dogma. These forgeries in detail–a false word here, a fake phrase there–were enough to persuade Pico that mysteries of Kabbalah were keys to heaven for Christians.
Pico acquired these books–utterly unknown to Christians and unintelligible to them–in the years before he wrote (but never delivered) his celebrated speech and published the Conclusions in 1486. An immense barrier to understanding Pico’s Christianised Kabbalah was that almost no Christians, except a few converts like Flavius, could read Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages of Kabbalah. In his time and place, Pico was the great exception: he had learned those languages while studying with Elia and Flavius. The forger also faked a language of his own and called it “Chaldean”–an idiosyncratic blend of Hebrew and Aramaic sometimes written in the Ge’ez script used for Ethiopic languages. A partial manuscript of the Oration, the only one that survives from Pico’s lifetime, contains a few phrases in Ge’ez, utterly mystifying to any Christian who might have seen it, and it seems they were few.
C: How much do we know about the Kabbalistic texts in Pico’s library? How much of an impact did Pico’s tutors, such as Flavius Mithridates and Yohanan Alemanno, have on Pico’s understanding of the Kabbalah?
BP: Later in his short life, after the Pope condemned his Conclusions, Pico kept studying Kabbalah, but more cautiously and quietly: the results can be seen in his Heptaplus (1489), a book about Kabbalah that never mentions the word.
Some information for the Heptaplus came from books that Flavius had already translated for Pico. Many of these manuscripts are still in the Vatican Library. They’re hard to read, but we’re learning more about them –authors and titles, for example–because Giulio Busi and his colleagues in Berlin have been publishing splendid editions of the Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin texts. This immensely valuable project follows up on groundbreaking research by Chaim Wirszubski, who first studied the Vatican manuscripts in detail. Harvard–thanks to Moshe Idel–published Wirszubski’s book in 1989.
Alemanno’s conversations with Pico, which influenced him greatly, probably started around 1488, while he was recovering from the catastrophic Conclusions. Like many Jews, Alemanno read Arabic as well as Hebrew and Aramaic, but–unlike most Jews–he also knew enough Greek and Latin to handle Plato and other ancient pagans. While finishing the Heptaplus, Pico was also working on a Psalms commentary, for which Alemanno’s writings about the Song of Songs and other Solomonic texts were very useful to him. By this time, Flavius had vanished from Pico’s neighborhoods in Tuscany and the Emilia-Romagna: both the tutor and the student had reasons to be grateful.
C: Would it be accurate to call Pico a theurgist? What did Pico think were the practical uses of magic and the imagination, if the ultimate goal of his regimen was, as you’ve put it, “self-cancellation” or “annihilation in God”?
BP: Theurgy–literally, “god-working”–is a practice that implements a theory. The core of the practice is to take steps–prayers, chants, rites, trances–meant to call a god down from the heavens into a material object, like a gem or statue or one’s own body. The theory was well known to Pico. His friend, Marsilio Ficino, published the best account of the theory since late antiquity. As for the practice, there are only a few scraps of evidence– mainly about singing–that might support calling Ficino a theurgist: but Ficino’s Christian piety makes this unlikely. In Pico’s case, there simply is no such evidence.
C: Why did Pico often adopt a mystifying style?
BP: Esoteric writing (another practice) is very old, at least as ancient as Plato. During the Middle Ages, unimpeachable Muslim (al-Farabi) and Jewish (Maimonides) authorities read the Koran and the Bible as esoteric writings. In recent times Leo Strauss, inspired by Farabi and Maimonides, promoted a technique of esoteric reading for major political texts, including the Constitution of the United States. Esoteric writers of such texts–so the story goes–never say what they really mean. This requires esoteric readers to be aware of the practice and to apply techniques of esoteric reading correctly. Pico knew nothing about Leo Strauss, of course, but he knew other Jewish and Muslim authorities, like Ibn Tufayl, who were esoteric adepts.
Moreover, Pico thought–and said so in the Oration–that the most sacred Christian teachings should be kept secret because making them public would (somehow) defile them. To authenticate his wish to keep pearls of wisdom away from swine, he cited the Gospels and apostolic behavior. And he saw all of this confirmed by his books of Kabbalah, where secrets and mysteries are sacred ideals, not hermeneutic puzzles. Especially in the Oration, where Pico announced his rule of secrecy, the prince wanted to mystify his readers, and he succeeded.
C: What were Pico’s views on prophecy? Did he see Girolamo Savonarola as a magus?
BP: Jewish and Muslim authorities on prophecy, like Avicenna and Maimonides, were well known to Pico. Prophecy was also a type of divination in pagan antiquity, when a Sibyl wrote in Latin to predict the birth of Jesus. But most of Pico’s information about–and confirmation of– prophecy came from Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and other biblical heroes. Pico had good reason to acknowledge and accept Savonarola’s claim to speak prophetically–as the voice of God’s wrath in the prince’s Italy. But common sense would have persuaded him not to call the raging friar a wizard. As a supporter of Savonarola, in any case, he would not have been tempted to provoke him.
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Great article, thank you!
Thanks for reading!