## 1. Life



Pico was born on February 24, 1463, to a noble Italian family, the
counts of Mirandola and Concordia near Modena in the Emilia-Romagna
north of Tuscany. Around the age of fourteen he left for Bologna,
intending briefly to study canon law, but within two years he moved to
Ferrara and shortly afterward to Padua, where he met one of his most
important teachers, Elia del Medigo, a Jew and an Averroist
Aristotelian. By the time he left Padua in 1482, he had also felt the
attraction of the Platonism being revived by Marsilio Ficino, and by
1484 he was corresponding with Angelo Poliziano and Lorenzo
de'Medici about poetry.



In 1485 he traveled from Florence to Paris, the citadel of
Aristotelian scholasticism. Before he left, at the age of twenty-two,
he had made his first important contribution to philosophy--a
defense of the technical terminology which since Petrarch's time
had incited humanist critics of philosophy to attack scholastic Latin
as a barbaric violation of classical norms. Having refined his
literary talent while developing his philosophical skills, Pico issued
his manifesto in the form of a letter to the renowned Ermolao Barbaro,
using the occasion and the genre to show, like Plato in the
*Phaedrus*, how rhetoric could equip a philosopher to defend
his calling against rhetorical assault.



After a short stay in Paris, Pico returned to Florence, and then
Arezzo, where he caused a scandal by abducting a young woman named
Margherita, already married to Giuliano Mariotto de' Medici.
Despite the support that came from Lorenzo de' Medici, the
commotion that followed and then a plague kept Pico on the move, just
at the time he was writing a *Commento* on a love poem by
Girolamo Benivieni and planning his larger scheme of philosophical
concord. At its core this project aimed to secure human happiness by
way of a philosophical harmony between Platonists and Aristotelians.
But in keeping with Pico's immense ambition, the scope of the
effort became global, striving to join all schools of thought in a
single symphony of philosophies. Pico planned to underwrite a
magnificent conference on this theme in Rome early in 1487, and in
preparation he assembled 900 theses from numerous
authorities--ancient and medieval, pagan and Christian, Moslem
and Jewish. He had these *Conclusions* printed in Rome at the
end of 1486, and to introduce them he composed a work of eventually
immense fame, the *Oration on the Dignity of Man*--as it
came to be called.



Intervention by the Holy See derailed Pico's plans and blocked
the conference. Innocent VIII appointed a commission that first
declared six of the theses suspect and condemned seven others, then
rejected Pico's clarifications and repudiated all thirteen. When
the *Apology* that Pico hastily published provoked Innocent to
denounce all nine hundred *Conclusions*, the audacious young
Count left for Paris, but at the pope's request he was detained
by French authorities and briefly jailed. By the summer of 1488 he was
back in Fiesole as the guest of Lorenzo, to whom in 1489 he dedicated
a short work called *Heptaplus, on the Sevenfold Account of the Six
Days of Genesis.*



Since 1483 Pico had a third of the income produced by his
family's estates, which along with his Mirandola property he
transferred in 1491 to his nephew Gianfrancesco, who was to become an
important philosopher in his own right and an early voice for the
revival of scepticism as an instrument of Christian faith. At this
time, however, even after the dust had settled on the provocative
*Conclusions*, contemporaries were unsure of the elder
Pico's orthodoxy, and the Kabbalist exegesis of Genesis in the
*Heptaplus*--tame though it is by Pico's earlier
standards--could scarcely restore their confidence. Meanwhile,
Pico pursued safer philological inquiries with Poliziano, who received
the dedication of a fragment *On Being and the One* in 1492.
Even though *De ente et uno* was meant as the first installment
of the great work that would prove Plato's thought in concord
with Aristotle's, not everyone accepted Pico's position
harmoniously--least of all Antonio Cittadini, a Pisan professor
who was still fighting about it with Gianfrancesco Pico two years
after his uncle's death.



In 1493 Pico achieved reconciliation with a higher authority when
Alexander VI pardoned him for his earlier misadventures. By this time
he had already grown close to Girolamo Savonarola, the fearsome
millenarian preacher who had recently become Prior of the Dominican
Convent of San Marco in Florence. Pico had known the prophetic friar
for some time, but now Savonarola was on his way to establishing a
theocratic tyranny in Florence. Growing ever more saintly, Pico
disposed of more of his property, giving some to the Church and some
to his family, as his habits became less and less worldly. He was
working hard on another huge project, the unfinished *Disputations
Against Divinatory Astrology*, when death (hastened by poison,
some said) came to him on November 17, 1494. Florence fell to the
French armies of Charles VIII on the same day, ending the dazzling age
of Florentine culture that Pico's blazing genius made all the
brighter, though only briefly. Ficino, a steadier spirit, survived him
by five years.


## 2. Works and Reputation



Pico's modern fame comes mainly from a speech that he never
gave, the *Oration on the Dignity of Man* that got its title
only after he died. He wrote the *Oration* in 1486 to introduce
his *900 Conclusions*, having chosen the capital of Christendom
as just the place to dispute the outrageous theological novelties
advertised by them--including the claim that magic and Kabbalah
are the best proofs of Christ's divinity. The Pope quashed
Pico's rash project, but not before the *Conclusions*
were already in print. To make matters worse, Pico then defended them
in an unsubmissive *Apology* that printed half of the original,
and not yet published, *Oration*--though not the half that
later became famous. As a whole, and mainly because its language is
enigmatic, the *Oration* was less inflammatory than the
*Conclusions*; it first appeared in the collection of his
uncle's works (*Commentationes*) published by
Gianfrancesco Pico in 1496. Gianfrancesco, the main source of
biographical information about the elder Pico, says that his uncle
thought little of the speech, regarding it as a piece of juvenilia.
For the next three centuries, few of Pico's readers were moved
to challenge this verdict, despite the author's continuing fame.
Until post-Kantian historians of philosophy were charmed by it, the
*Oration* was largely (though not entirely) ignored, in part
because of its publishing history.



Shortly after 1450, Giannozzo Manetti had completed a book *On
Human Worth and Excellence*, which--unlike Pico's
speech--really is about *dignitas* as that word had been
used by ancient Romans and medieval Christians: what they meant by it
was 'rank,' 'status,' 'value' or
'worth,' not what Kant would mean later by
*Wurde.* Manetti's *dignitas* was still
essentially a Christian notion made less otherworldly by the example
of ancient sages like Cicero and by the changed conditions of Italian
life in the fifteenth century. The last part of Manetti's book
is an attack on a twelfth-century treatise *On Human Misery* by
Cardinal Lotario dei Segni, before he became Pope Innocent III.
Manetti took his lead from two contemporaries--Antonio da Barga
and Bartolomeo Facio--who had already written about his topic but
in much more conventional ways. Pico's speech pays no attention
at all to these three earlier texts on *dignitas* because
*dignitas* is not his subject. Instead, he wanted to convince
people to use magic and Kabbalah in order to change themselves into
angels.



Except as part of Pico's collected works, the Latin text of the
*Oration* was printed only once before the 1940s, when the
first translation into English also appeared, just after the first
Italian version in 1936. What readers saw on the title-page of the
1496 *Commentationes* was simply *A Very Elegant
Oration*, which in 1530--in the only separately published
Latin text of the pre-modern era--expanded into *On Man by
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, explaining the loftier mysteries of
sacred and human philosophy*. Meanwhile, the front-matter of the
five collected editions or reprints between 1498 and 1521 stayed with
the 1496 formulation, *Oratio quaedam elegantissima*, which in
1557 finally became *On the Dignity of Man* in a Basel
collection and, in a Venice edition of the same year, *A Very
Elegant Oration on the High Nobility and Dignity of Man*. The two
other early modern collections of 1572 and 1601 used a new format that
no longer listed contents by title at the front of the book.



The British Library Catalog, which has about 1300 entries for books by
Erasmus published by 1700, has about 100 for Pico. During the same
period, when Marsilio Ficino's *De vita libri tres* went
through more than thirty editions, Pico's Latin
*Oration*--far better known to modern readers than
Ficino's *Three Books on Life*--got almost no
attention from publishers. Of the five dozen or so Pico titles that
found a publisher by 1700, about half were collections of letters. The
first two, called *Golden Letters*, were incunabular editions,
and the letters also figured prominently in early collections of
Pico's works, whose front-matter listed Ficino, Poliziano and
other cultural celebrities with whom Pico corresponded



Two things made Pico's Latin letters a durable commercial hit:
celebrity and education. Since Latin was still the main medium of
learned communication in the late seventeenth century, when Isaac
Newton published his *Principia* in that undead language,
educated people kept writing letters in Latin and used writers like
Pico as models. And Pico was attractive not only because of his
elegant style but also because he had been a celebrity in his own
lifetime and remained so in Newton's day. He stayed famous in
three ways: as a critic of astrology; as an expert on Kabbalah; and as
the amazing Pico--as the Phoenix who blazed through a brief life
in the triple glare of an old aristocratic society, a new mandarin
culture of classical scholarship and, in his last years, the
millenarian fantasies of Savonarola's Florence. Noble origins,
fashionable friends, physical beauty, prodigious learning, capacious
memory, scholarly journeys, youthful sins, trouble with the Church,
eventual repentance and a pious death: these are the motifs of the
family hagiography by his nephew that have kept Giovanni Pico famous
for being famous over the centuries.



Because he died so young, Pico finished very little and published
less: the vernacular *Commento* was neither completed nor
published in his lifetime; the *Conclusions* are just bare
statements of theses; half of the preface to the rushed
*Apology* was lifted from the unpublished *Oration*;
*On Being and the One* is a small piece of a larger effort to
harmonize Plato and Aristotle; and Gianfrancesco found the unfinished
*Disputations Against Astrology* bundled with his dead
uncle's papers. Pico had only three works printed in his
lifetime: the *Conclusions*, the *Apology* and the
*Heptaplus.* 



The *Apology*, which defends the *Conclusions* against
charges of heresy, is Pico's longest piece of philosophical
writing, and eleven of its thirteen parts are conventional scholastic
philosophy in the manner of Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham. But his
sources for the *Apology* were also Durand de Saint-Pourcain,
Henry of Ghent, Jean Quidort, Robert Holcot and a dozen other
lesser-known scholastics. Since most of the content of the
*Conclusions* and all its presentation is also thoroughly
scholastic, Pico did not present himself as a humanist in his first
two printed works, which were the basis of his reputation during his
lifetime, except on his home turf in Tuscany and the Emilia-Romagna.
He wrote the two epistolary essays on poetry and philosophical
language in the humanist style, but few saw them during his lifetime.
Besides the *Conclusions* and the *Apology*, the only
work that Pico completed and made public in print while he lived was
the *Heptaplus* (1489), a Kabbalist commentary on the first 26
verses of Genesis.



That topic, called *Ma'aseh Bereshit* or the Work of the
Beginning, was a favorite of Menahem Recanati, Abraham Abulafia and
other Kabbalists whom Pico knew through learned Italian Jews,
including Elia del Medigo, Flavius Mithridates and Yohanan Alemanno.
Kabbalah, which Pico saw as the holier Hebrew analog of the gentile
'ancient theology' revealed by Marsilio Ficino, is
provocatively on display in the *900 Conclusions*: 119 of them,
including the final and culminating 72, are Kabbalist
theses--outlandishly Kabbalist from a Christian point of view.
Pico's project, part of a search for harmonies connecting all
the world's wisdom traditions, was to ground primary doctrines
of Christology and trinitarian theology in Kabbalah, which he traced
to the oral Torah confided to Moses and passed on in secret through
Esdras and other sages. Because of its Mosaic origin, Kabbalah was
holier to Pico than the pagan wisdom that Ficino had traced to
Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, in ancient Chaldaea and Egypt,
where Ficino found the beginnings of Platonic philosophy. Pico was the
first Christian who had the expertise, including a little Hebrew and
Aramaic, to back up the astonishing claims that would make Kabbalah
the core of the ancient theology.



Although Kabbalist writings had first appeared in the twelfth century,
Christians before Pico knew almost nothing about them. The Kabbalah
that he discovered for the Latin West is a theory as well as a
practice, at bottom a kind of biblical hermeneutics. And for some
Kabbalists, then and now, textual theorizing underwrites a spiritual
practice whose aim is mystical ascent for the excitation of prophetic
or messianic states by various techniques, including magic and
theurgy. Many Kabbalists believe that the Hidden God, called the
Infinite, reveals himself not only in the Bible but also through ten
emanations or attributes, the *Sefirot*. Hypostasized in myths,
made concrete by images and symbolized by letters and numbers, the
*Sefirot* are at the core of Kabbalist speculation, whose other
major focus is the names of God and their resonance in words of
scripture.



Kabbalists regard the meaning of God's sacred speech, the Hebrew
text of the Bible, as infinite, finding significance even in its
smallest particles--not only the divine words but also their
letters (which are also numbers) and even the shapes of those letters.
The most powerful words are God's names, the holiest of which,
the Tetragrammaton, cannot be uttered; written as YHWH, it is
pronounced *Adonai*, a spoken name like *Elohim*,
*Ehyeh*, *El Shaddai* and others used of God in the
Hebrew Bible. Other words of great power are the names of the
*Sefirot*, which are unknown, as such, to the Bible; they are
names not of God but of aspects or manifestations or emanations of
divinity.



Since God in his highest essence remains hidden, finite beings can
know the Infinite only in so far as it descends from its secret
heights. The last moments of that descent make up the world of common
human awareness. The first moments, far beyond the reach of ordinary
perception, are the ten *Sefirot*. Much of the literature of
Kabbalah tries to describe the *Sefirot*, often as shown in
***Figure 1***, where all ten (designated
**S1** through **S10**) are arranged in a
diagram or 'tree.' The major names in Hebrew of
**S4**, for example, are *Gedullah* and
*Hesed*, meaning Greatness and Love or Piety, rendered by Pico
as *Amor* or *Pietas*. The divine name usually
associated with **S4** is *El*, but Pico knew that
Kabbalists use many other words and names (Abraham, Michael, the
South, Water) to describe **S4**. The terminology that
Pico used for the *Sefirot*, which he called
'numerations' in Latin, is displayed in more detail in
***Figure 2***.






|  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- |
|  | **S1** *Keter*

Crown

Fatum Supremum

'Ehyeh |  |
| **S3** *Binah*

Intelligence

*Intelligentia*

YHWH (*'Elohim*)
 |  | **S2** *Hochmah*

Wisdom

*Sapientia*

*Yah*
 |
| **S5** *Gevurah*/*Din*

Power/Judgment

Potentia/Judicium

'Elohim |  | **S4** *Gedullah/Hesed*

Greatness/Love or Piety

Amor or Pietas

'El |
|  | **S6** *Tiferet/Rahamim*

Beauty/Compassion

*Tipheret/Clementia*

YHWH (*'Adonay*) |  |
| **S8** *Hod*

Majesty

Decor

*'Elohim Tseb'aot* |  | **S7** *Netsah*

Endurance

Eternitas

YHWH *Tseb'aot* |
|  | **S9** *Tsaddiq/Yesod*

Righteous/Foundation

*Justus/Fundamentum*

*'El Hay/Shaddai*
 |  |
|  | **S10** *Malkut*/ *'Atarah*

Kingdom/Diadem

*Regnum*

*'Adonai* |  |



Figure 1. The Ten Sefirot







|  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- |
|  | **S1** Fatum Supremum

Father, Unity

Lord of the Nose

*aleph*, *hu* |  |
| **S3** *Intelligentia*

Holy Spirit, Reason

Green Line, Jubilee, Repentance, Love

*beth*, *he*, *scin*
 |  | **S2** *Sapientia*

Son, Christ, Jesus, Messiah, Intellect

Beginning, Eden, Fear

*beth*, *iod*
 |
| **S5**
*Judicium*,*Potentia*

Isaac, Gabriel

North, Fear, Fire |  | **S4** *Amor*, *Pietas*

Abraham, Michael

South, Love, Water |
|  | **S6** *Tipheret, Clementia*

Son, Christ, Jesus, Messiah

Jacob, Uriel

East, Sun, Day, Shining Mirror, Heaven

*vav* |  |
| **S8** *Decor* |  | **S7** *Eternitas* |
|  | **S9** *Fundamentum*,
*Justus*

Redeemer, Water

*nun, ze*
 |  |
|  | **S10** *Regnum*

Holy Spirit

David, Raphael, Israel, Sabbath

West, Bride, Daughter, Dwelling, Moon, Night, Unshining Mirror, Fear

Red Heifer, Hind With One Horn, Pure Wine, Sea

*tav, he* |  |



Figure 2. Pico's Sefirot
(Numerations)




Pico was the first Christian to treat knowledge of Kabbalah as
valuable. Flavius Mithridates, his most prolific Jewish informant,
translated (and mistranslated) thousands of pages of Kabbalah into
Latin for him. Large portions of the *Oration*, drawing on
these texts, are also informed by Kabbalah in ways that no
contemporary Christian could have detected--least of all a
Christian who lacked the clues provided by the *Conclusions.*
The esoteric intention of Pico's thought, proclaimed
emphatically in the *Oration*, is the feature that most
distances it from the whole project of post-Cartesian philosophy in
the West and also from earlier philosophies outside the Platonic
tradition. Wishing not just to mystify but also to provoke, Pico
succeeded and paid the price of the Church's censure.



Theology, spirituality and philosophy--all in the broadest
sense--are the main topics of Pico's Kabbalah, which shows
(or hints) how God reveals himself in the *Sefirot*, the divine
names and the words of scripture. In the 72 Kabbalist theses at the
end of the *Conclusions*, this revelation becomes Christology
and Trinitarian theology. From a Kabbalist point of view, the
*Sefirot* and the divine names are actors in dramas of
theology, cosmology, anthropology and angelology whose major themes
are exile, death, atonement and redemption, stories that Pico
transposes onto the Christian Trinity, with Jesus Christ, the Messiah,
as the saving hero.



Accordingly, leading points of spiritual practice in the
*Conclusions* are prayer, prophecy and ascent to mystical union
with God**,** which is also the main topic of the
*Oration*, where Pico makes positive use of magic and theurgy
as steps toward the ascent. The *Conclusions*, which confirm
this endorsement of magic, also show in greater detail than the
*Oration* why Pico links magic with Kabbalah. He sees it as a
spiritual technique which, like the higher theurgy of the Neoplatonic
philosophers, locates and opens routes to God which ordinarily are
unknown to humans. The practice of Kabbalah starts with theory because
these hidden channels of divinity must be disclosed and interpreted
before they can be used: spirituality follows hermeneutics.



Technical details of hermeneutics are the most obscure material in the
*Conclusions*, especially Pico's speculations about
Hebrew words and letters. Language is the gateway to wisdom, the
elements of language are letters and numbers, and these signs
proliferate in secret codes. Pico's genius and ambition, which
the Church would see as impudence, attracted him to this provocative
theology of the hidden word, whose enigmas and ambiguities encouraged
his fascination with the esoteric. The larger Kabbalist project of the
*Conclusions*, and hence of the Kabbalah in the
*Oration*, is Christological and Trinitarian. The smaller
exhibitions of Kabbalah that Pico uses to support his grand theory
focus on particular Biblical texts, which are also illuminated by the
Gentile wisdom of the ancient theologians.



Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras and other ancient
theologians are among the authorities from whom Pico derives his 900
theses, but so are Aquinas, Albertus and other scholastics, Averroes,
Avicenna and other Muslims as well as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,
Proclus and the Greek commentators. The *Conclusions* are,
among other things, an egregious advertisement of Pico's
learning in a catalog of philosophical propositions which are often
challenging to orthodoxy and sometimes paradoxical--a word that
Pico himself used to describe some of his propositions, whose
ancestors were the quodlibetal theses debated in medieval
universities. He ascribed only the last group of about 500 to himself,
attaching the first set of roughly 400 to ancient and medieval
authorities, among whom were the Kabbalists--by far the least
familiar to Pico's contemporaries.



In the *Heptaplus* of 1489 we can still hear the Kabbalist
voice of the *Conclusions*, but mainly because Pico's
earlier works since the *Commento* of 1485-6 have
prepared us to listen for it. Although all these texts discuss
Kabbalah more openly than the *Heptaplus*, they seem to have
made little impression on Pico's contemporaries. Roberto
Salviati, a well informed Florentine who knew Pico well, called the
*Heptaplus* "the first fruits of his studies" when
he arranged to have it printed. That Salviati thought the
*Commento*, *Conclusions* and *Apology*
negligible or embarrassing is more likely than that he did not know
those works. Simple ignorance is likelier in the case of the
*Oration*, which Pico's nephew would later describe as
having been kept out of circulation by his uncle. For readers whom
Kabbalah might alienate, the *Heptaplus* was not much of a
threat because Pico had sanitized it. (For the best account of the
*Heptaplus*, see the book by Crofton Black (2006).



Although Genesis was not as attractive to Christian interpreters as
Job or the Psalms, explicating the creation narrative of Gen.
1:1-26 had been a task of hermeneutics since the great hexameral
commentaries of Basil of Caesarea and Ambrose. Like all of the Bible,
the creation story was thought to have three layers of meaning beyond
its literal or 'historical' sense: allegorical,
tropological and anagogical. The standard view was that "history
talks about events, allegory about how one thing is understood from
another, tropology discusses morals, ... and anagogy is the
spiritual meaning ... that leads to higher things." The
*Heptaplus* proposes and practices a new kind of allegory, a
method derived from the structure of creation itself and directed
toward a new type of anagogy or ascent to supreme bliss
(*felicitas*) in the Godhead.



Pico provides the key to his system only in the last part of the
*Heptaplus*, which seems to be an appendix tacked on to the
work--just another display of the author's virtuoso skill
in Hebrew. But to learned Jews of the day, whether they were Kabbalist
or not, Pico's analysis of the Hebrew letters of the first word
of Genesis (*Bereshit*, "In the beginning") would
have seemed crude and simple-minded. Only from a Christian perspective
was there anything exotic in it, and its main effect on Christians
would have been to dazzle them with art.



This seemingly extraneous ending is actually a grand and arcane
finale. It hints at a secret that no Christian of Pico's day
could have grasped: that Moses himself, the author of the creation
story, had passed through 49 Gates of Understanding--7 x
7--on his way to the fiftieth, the supreme and final Gate to
union with God. The 49 preliminary Gates are all the compartments of
creation, which in turn demonstrate Pico's new allegorical
method by exemplifying it: the universe of existence is also the
universe of understanding that shows the path to mystical union.



Although Pico does not explain the Gates in the *900
Conclusions*, he does mention them in a way that gave later
scholars, like Johann Reuchlin, the clues that they needed to find
such enigmas in Kabbalist texts and then decipher them. The short
version of the story is that Wisdom, the second *Sefirah*
(**S2**; see ***Fig. 1***) builds the
palace of Intelligence (**S3**) and carves 50 Gates into
it, 7 revealed in each of the 7 lower *Sefirot*
(**S1**-**7**) and another one unrevealed.
The 50 Gates, also called the Jubilee, correspond to the 50-year
festival ordained in Leviticus but also to a millenarian Great Jubilee
of 50,000 years, when the 7 sabbatical cycles or weeks of 7,000 years
come to an end. After the lower *Sefirot* collapse into
**S3** in a final millennium, the cycle starts again,
having been completed in that last generation of a thousand
years--in the Sabbath of the *Shekinah*
(**S10**). This Sabbath, the seventh day of rest after
the six days of creation, is Pico's ultimate allegory of
mystical union, the secret encoded not only in the letters of
*Bereshit* but also in the sevenfold structure of the
*Heptaplus* itself.



But who knew or could have known? In 1489, when the *Heptaplus*
was published, its only informed readership was the handful of learned
Jews in Italy who could also read Latin--the very people who had
taught Pico himself enough Kabbalah to fill his *Conclusions*
with it. In the *Heptaplus*, however, even where its structure
and content obviously depend on Kabbalah, Pico suppresses what the
Jews had taught him, until the final exposition of *Bereshit*
that could only have baffled Christian readers if it did not offend
them. As in his earlier works, Pico intends to mystify because he
believes that the highest and most sacred wisdom must not be divulged
in plain language. He wants God's secrets to be understood only
by an elite clever enough to unravel the allegories that
conceal them. The surprising thing, in the Western tradition of
philosophy, is that Pico thinks of this project as philosophical.



Despite Pico's effort to keep Kabbalah so well hidden in the
*Heptaplus* that Christians would not reject the book outright,
it was the extravagant and explicit theosophy of the
*Conclusions*, framed posthumously by the *Oration*,
that made him the patriarch of Christian Kabbalah. Reuchlin and other
masters of this new syncretism looked back to Pico as their model;
German theologians and biblical scholars were still debating his
theses when the young Immanuel Kant began teaching in Konigsberg.
But by the end of the eighteenth century, Kant had so thoroughly
revolutionized philosophy that its history had to be reformulated in
Kantian terms. In practice, the task was to update the huge
*Critical History of Philosophy* produced by Jacob Brucker in
1742, where the eclectic Brucker describes Pico as that worst of all
monsters, a Platonizing, Judaizing syncretist. Half a century later,
Wilhelm Tennemann began the revisionist *History of Philosophy*
(1798-1819) in which Pico makes his first appearance as a
proto-Kantian advocate of human freedom and dignity.



In the first few pages of the *Oration*--pages read more
often than any other product of Renaissance Latin humanism--God
tells Adam that he, alone of all creatures, can make himself what he
wants to be. Fascinated by this stirring prelude to a longer speech,
Tennemann, and many readers after him, have taken Pico's
oratorical prelude as evidence of a morality grounded, like
Kant's, in human freedom and dignity. Having gathered strength
during the nineteenth century, and having acquired a romantic patina,
this view of Pico--and, by implication, of Renaissance
humanism--reached its peak with the great Neo-Kantian of his age,
Ernst Cassirer. When Cassirer and Paul Kristeller, also a Kantian,
came to the United States, they brought their Kantian Pico with them,
launching his long career in university textbooks of 'Western
Civilization' after World War II. Meanwhile, Eugenio Garin had
published what is still the most important book on Pico in the Fascist
Italy of 1937, just before the racial laws were put into force.



The most conspicuous pages of the *Oration*, celebrated by
Garin and many others as the humanist charter of human freedom and
dignity, are just the first few. Assured by them that we *can*
be what we *want* to be, we are then told--contrary to the
usual interpretation of the *Oration*--that what we
*must* be is not human at all. We must become
angels--bodiless, sexless and ultimately, that most unromantic of
all conditions, *selfless* in the strictest sense. Cherubim,
the next-to-highest angels, are the first higher stage that we must
reach, and to achieve that lofty state we must shed not only the body
that imprisons us but also the identity and personality that
distinguish us from all other individuals and from God. Mystical union
with God is Pico's final goal, and extinguishing the self is a
necessary consequence of achieving it. "Let a *holy*
ambition possess our spirit," Pico writes.



> 
> 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
> the things of earth, let us despise those of heaven, and then, leaving
> behind whatever is of the world, let us fly up to the hypercosmic
> court nearest the most exalted divinity.... As we emulate the
> Cherubic life on earth, checking the impulses of the emotions through
> moral knowledge, dispelling the darkness of reason through dialectic,
> let us cleanse the soul by washing away the dirt of ignorance and vice
> so that the emotions will not rage in fury nor reason go mad and
> foolish. Then let us flood the soul, purified and well tempered, with
> the light of natural philosophy so that finally we may perfect it with
> knowledge of divinity.... [Then] we will fully enjoy the peace
> that we have longed for--the holiest peace, the unbreakable 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 that
> friendship which the Pythagoreans say is the end of all philosophy.
> This is that peace which God gives on high and angels descending to
> earth have announced to men of good will so that through this peace
> these same men, ascending to heaven, might be made into
> angels.... Ever forgetful of herself, [the soul] will wish *to
> die in herself that she might live in her spouse*, in whose sight
> the death of his saints is most precious--death, I say, if one
> should use the word 'death' for that fullness of life
> whose contemplation the sages have said is the aim of
> philosophy.... Lifted now to the topmost height of her
> watchtower, for all eternity looking out without interruption over
> what is, what will be and what has been, we shall sing prophecies like
> Phoebus, and, gazing up at primeval beauty, we shall be its winged
> lovers, until at last, with a love that cannot be described, driven
> wild by desire 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.
> 



At the lowest level of a self-annihilating *paideia*, the
mystic starts as a philosopher--with ethics, logic, natural
philosophy and theology--before ascending through the arcana of
magic and Kabbalah to drown the self in the abyss of divinity. This is
not a Kantian project, and the *Oration on the Dignity of Man*
that locates the human condition in human freedom and dignity is a
text created by us post-Kantians, not by Giovanni Pico.



The outline of the *Oration* given below is also not
Pico's. Its seven parts may or may not be what he had in mind,
but from the layout of the *900 Conclusions* it is clear that
he thought along numerological lines. Moreover, the title and
organization of the *Heptaplus* show that 7 was a particularly
meaningful number to him--like so many other seekers of secrets.
The full title is *Heptaplus, on the Sevenfold Account of the Six
Days of Genesis*, surely an invitation to ponder arithmetical
mysteries. Since this work of 1489 restates a theme--ascending to
*felicitas* or supreme happiness--that had occupied Pico
since the *Commento* of 1485-6, it would not be
surprising to find that its sevenfold structure derives from earlier
writings, including the *Oration*. That famous speech can be
analyzed as follows:


1. Man is the greatest wonder because he can choose to transform
himself.
2. In order to choose well, however, he must emulate the angels.
3. In order to emulate the angels, he must learn how to live the
angelic life--specifically, the Cherubic life.
4. This lesson, a curriculum, can be learned from the ancient
fathers, who are
	1. Paul and Dionysius
	2. Jacob
	3. Job
	4. Moses
	5. The ancient theologians (Orpheus, Socrates, Plato, Plotinus)
	6. Pythagoras
	7. Zoroaster, the Chaldaeans, Abraham and Jeremiah
5. Because it is philosophy that leads to the Cherubic life, Pico
proclaims himself a philosopher.
6. And the study of philosophy has also led Pico to other new
doctrines, notably magic and Kabbalah.
7. Therefore, despite the complaints of his critics, Pico will
undertake his philosophical disputation.



The lesson taught seven times in the central part of the
*Oration* (part **4** above) is a curriculum whose
felicitous goal is mystical union with God: first elaborated by the
ancient Neoplatonists, it was taken up by the Church Fathers and
became a commonplace of Christian mysticism, though Pico would also
have found it in such Kabbalist texts as the commentary on the Song of
Songs by Levi ben Gerson. The student starts with moral philosophy and
then moves through dialectic and natural philosophy toward theology,
until discursive thought gives way to ecstasy, pure contemplation and
finally unification. The stages of this *paideia* are


1. moral philosophy
2. dialectic
3. natural philosophy
4. theology
5. magic
6. Kabbalah
7. mystical union



Magic and Kabbalah are preliminary to union in this process but still
important. By propelling the soul through the heavens toward
supercelestial divinity, magic assists the transition from natural
philosophy to natural theology and beyond, while Kabbalah, which rises
higher than any discursive theology, changes humans into angels purged
of all traces of matter and thus prepared for *henosis*
or absolute unification with God. The philosophical theory behind this
spirituality goes back to the Greek Commentators on Aristotle and
becomes more explicit in Avicenna, Averroes and other Muslim sages. In
philosophical terms that were certainly controversial, but far more
familiar than Kabbalah, Pico's aim was conjunction with the
Agent Intellect.



In Pico's lifetime, of course, even his less obscure views about
mystical union were little known because the texts were either not
published or not comprehensible to a Latin readership. Gianfrancesco
Pico, in the *Life* of Pico that accompanies the correspondence
that the nephew also edited, tried to rescue his uncle's
reputation. The final item in Pico's bibliography, the
*Disputations Against Astrology* is, like the letters,
problematic in its textual history because of Gianfrancesco's
involvement in its publication. (The best account of the
*Disputations* is the article by Anthony Grafton listed in
*Pichiana* by Quaquarelli and Zanardi.)



The unfinished *Disputations* is a long and unwelcoming book,
made all the more forbidding by its ragged presentation and reliance
on so many obscure and technical sources; much of it repeats and
reinforces ancient and medieval objections to astrology. Pico extends
Ptolemy's doubts about a few astrological practices, for
example, into a broader restriction on celestial influences, which he
finds either too diffuse or too slight to be the basis of precise
predictions. He exposes the claims made by astrologers who often
contradicted themselves and violated the canons of reason and
experience that the sciences must rely upon. The logical,
methodological and epistemological complaints compiled by Pico had
been well known since before the ancient sceptics recorded their
objections. Pico's real breakthrough was to use humanist
philology as a new weapon against astrology, which he does not reject
categorically.



Part of astrology's credibility was its pedigree, its long
descent from sages of ancient Chaldaea and Egypt. The *Oration*
and *Conclusions* authenticate this genealogy by reinforcing it
with the even more venerable tradition of Kabbalah. Like Kabbalah,
astrology was also made plausible by classicism, the new humanist
culture that measured the authority of a doctrine by its age. Since
astrology could claim a record of observing planets and stars over
several millennia, it had stood the test of primordial time as its
experience accumulated.



In the *Disputations* that he did not live to finish, Pico now
rejected this static mytho-history. Calling on new techniques of
biblical and historical chronology, he relocated such cardinal figures
as Zoroaster in the human landscape of historical time, thus making
them subject to what would later be called 'historical
criticism.' Pico's critical sense was far from modern,
however. When he attacked Chaldaean stargazers as ignorant and
superstitious, part of what he found credulous was their obsession
with mathematics. Although Pico's attitude to mathematics was
scarcely progressive, following the Aristotelian convention, his
*Disputations* eventually attracted Kepler's attention,
as well as praise from the later historians and philologists who used
his re-dating of the Eastern sages to greatly diminish--if not to
eliminate--the allure of the ancient theology.



Pico's least eccentric work of philosophy is the little treatise
*On Being and the One*: it takes an Aristotelian position
against a Neoplatonic distinction between being and the One that made
the latter higher than the former in the order of the All. In effect,
since Marsilio Ficino had developed just such a position, Pico's
essay was a challenge to the older philosopher, who saw it as such,
and objected politely. Pico's larger purpose was to harmonize
Aristotle with Plato, which had also been the goal of many of the
ancient commentators on Aristotle, most of whom were Neoplatonists
themselves. But Pico was not Platonic enough to suit Ficino, just as
he was not Aristotelian enough for doctrinaire Aristotelians. The
future was on Pico's side, however, inasmuch as most of the
Aristotelianism of the sixteenth century would be eclectic, though not
as concordist as Pico would have liked. Eclectic critics of the
Enlightenment, like Jacob Brucker, despised Pico's concordism
and called it "syncretism."



Ficino's irenic disposition also encouraged concordism, which
was more than just compatible with the historiography of
philosophy--the ancient theology--that he promoted in all
his works as a way to Christianize the heritage of pagan wisdom. In
general, Ficino welcomed Pico as a junior ally in that same cause, as
evidenced by the warm personal language of the correspondence between
the two thinkers. It is striking, however, that Ficino's
letters, published by him in his own lifetime, in 1495, testify better
to his friendship with Pico than Pico's letters, published in
1496 by his nephew, Gianfrancesco, who also prepared the
*Disputations* for the press in that same year. A close reading
of both epistolaries suggests that the younger Pico--who was at
least as close to Savonarola as his uncle--intervened to make the
elder Pico's letters, as they appeared in the collected works
that the nephew edited in 1496, underwrite the pious *Life*
that introduces the whole collection.



The Pico of that *Life* is a Savonarolan saint who came almost
too late to salvation but finally rejected the world, the flesh and
the devil. This is not the Pico who traveled to Rome a few years
before to take on the whole world in a failed philosophical
extravaganza; nor the Pico who bungled an attempt to carry off a
married woman whose husband was named Medici--no less; nor the
Pico with whom Ficino bantered about his missteps and misfortunes in
letters loaded with astro-mythological allusions. It may be that the
disasters of 1486-7 chastened the young nobleman enough to
explain the muffling of Kabbalah in the *Heptaplus* and the
jarring recantation that we find in the *Disputations*. But
since the editor of the *Disputations*, Gianfrancesco Pico,
also edited the letters that he selected to underwrite a tendentious
*Life* of his uncle, and since Gianfrancesco himself was not
just a devout fideist but also a prodigiously productive scholar and
an original thinker, we should not dismiss the possibility that the
*Disputations* ought to be read more as a pendant to the
nephew's *Life* of Pico than as proof of penitence in a
final phase of his uncle's meteoric career.