Dead Sea On Your Screen

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15063895

Looks like we'll finally have free access to the Dead Sea Scrolls. If you're able to read Hebrew or Aramaic, that is.

Five scrolls have been put online now, and if I'm not mistaking they're aiming to digitize everything by 2016. Too late of course, I highly doubt that this spectacular act of wisdom-sharing will appeal to the sweaty masses running their weekly laps of gluttonous consumerism at the local Ikea. Which is too bad, because the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls constitutes one of the most important archaeological finds of the previous century, seeing as how the Scrolls shed light on the origins of Christianity and its connection to Judaism, and contain valuable information on the religious and everyday climate of the first century CE.

 The caves where the scrolls were found.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered over a period of 9 years between 1947 and 1956 from a cluster of eleven caves lying along the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, about 13 miles from Jerusalem. All in all, some 972 texts have been found, divided into thousands of fragments. They are taken to be written by the Essenes, a Jewish religious sect dedicated to abstinence, poverty and all those crackbrained denunciations of the physical world endemic to deranged group movements, but they were also dedicated to the belief of the messiah, or rigtheous teacher, arriving at the end of times, which we (and now also you) call "eschatology". Furthermore, like almost all Jewish orders, they were heavily engaged in the critical interpretation and explanation of the Old Testament which we (and now also you) call "exegesis".

Still not all of the texts have been published (nor even translated for that matter), and there was some deliciously shady stuff going on with this process in the 50's and 60's of the previous century, but I will leave that dangling in front of your noses until next time.

See you soon!

Here you can check out the digitized versions of the Scrolls. Bring a dictionary.

http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/ 

Mother Temple

What's left of the Temple of Venus Genetrix.

Cut back to 46 BCE. On this very day (I'm assuming Wikipedia corrected the ancient calendar to coincide with our modern one) Julius Caesar dedicated the Temple of Venus Genetrix ("Mother Venus") to the goddess of love in her aspect as ancestress of the Roman people and patron of motherhood and domesticity. September 26th thereafter became the day on which the festival in honor of Mother Venus was held, while yet other days (like August 12 and October the 9th) were reserved for tribute to the goddess in her other facets.

At first, Caesar wanted to dedicate his latest temple to Venus Victrix ("The Victorious"), seeing as how he had just cleverly defeated Pompey the Great at the Battle of Pharsalus (48 BCE), during the Great Roman Civil War (48-45 BCE), after which Caesar became dictator in perpetuity of Rome, the Roman Republic quietly disbanded and the path was laid for the Julio-Claudian dynasty of emperors, beginning with Augustus (who never formally called himself, or was adressed as, "emperor", preferring instead "princeps": first citizen) and ending with Nero. However, he eventually decided it was better to honor Venus as the progenitor of the family line of the Julio-Claudians, because who better to rule an empire* than someone descending from the gods themselves? It was this kind of mythical legitimization that would eventually fuel Julius Caesar's own deification (after Caesar's death the Great Comet of 44 BCE was considered to be his soul rising to heaven and henceforth he became known as divus Julius) and lead to the imperial cult of Rome, where the emperor was dignified as a god.

So what have we learned today? Myths can also function as handy propaganda tools. First and foremost myths serve as legitimizations in societies and cultures, whether that be of emperors, kings, leaders or social customs or important rites. Myths are the signifiers through which a given civilization strengthens and justifies its own identity and social organisation.

Tell a friend.

*Anachronism! At that time it was still a Republic! Good catch, anonymous internet fiend.

I'm Seeing Stars

 Gaze upon the face of evil and hear the voice of doom.

About 17 years ago The Orion Mystery, written by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, came out. It became an instant bestseller, maybe some of you even have it in your libraries. If so, burn it post haste, and pray to this blog for intellectual salvation and cosmic deliverance. To be honest, I never read the book (I got the information from a BBC documentaries-DVD I rented at the local libary in hopes of gaining some fresh inisghts on mythology from the established Anglican institution, all in vain of course) and I also don't know exactly who Adrian Gilbert is. In the documentary Bauval is joined by Graham Hancock, ever zealous embracer of cockamamy theories built on quick sand and pious defender of their negligible relevance, and the two are given ample opportunity to rave about the baffling coincidence between the alignment of the three pyramids of Giza and the three stars of Orion's so-called belt. Hancock is even given space to spew forth more simpering, quasi-intellectual conjectures about how the Great Sphinx of Giza was probably constructed before 10,000 BCE by a people that must have had something to do with Atlantis and that it is supposedly a reference to the constellation of Leo.

 The correlation of the pyramids with the stars of Orion's belt. If only it was so unblemished in reality....

But do not despair, dear readers! They even had me fooled for a while with their sly fabrications and false hypotheses! Yes! Once upon a time I managed to stray off the rigtheous path, and great tragedy befell my poor, yet glorious soul. But anyway, the "perfect match" between the pyramids and Orion's belt claimed by Bauval (he was an engineer, for god's sakes! What the hell does he know about astronomy!?) and Hancock, was not quite so perfect, and in fact the correlation only existed in a mirror image. However, this small incongruence was quickly overcome by inverting the map printed in the book so that the parallel seemed exact, and Bauval and Hancock later claimed to have always meant that the analogy they spotted was in basis of the ground being a mirror-image of the heavens anyway. 

So what? Maybe they could have gotten some details and calculations and specifications wrong, but the similitude exists, even if it is only a visual one. True, and I'll grant you that there is a definite astrological significance to the pyramids of Giza and countless other ancient (and not so-ancient) buildings, but this does not mean that the stars and their placements are the foundations from which every kind of artistic, religious or state-building impulse of ancient people arose and certainly not that by reconstructing the movements of the heavens you can also retrace the original meaning of myth and history.

We call this type of intellectual fumbling archaeoastronomy and it is one of the many great evils and heinous sins in mythography that you will come across on the road to redemption. Best to know and understand its malevolence early therefore, in order to properly repel its temptation, is it not? So you are forgiven, dear child, for calling into question my flawless insight earlier, for you are but a fledling who has yet to learn to fly, and it is therefore that I take pity on your small, inadequate soul.

Oh, and hey, what the heck, another apt Rainbow song!

Space Junk

 The constellation of Orion as depicted in Johann Bayer's star atlas "Uranomatria" (1603)

Thank god R.E.M. is splitting up. Yesterday I had to get up insanely early to catch my flight from Pisa to Maastricht, after a 5-day mythical retreat in Florence. However, I do not undertake these trips for my leisure and enjoyment, faithful disciples. Oh no. The penetrating stink of your incompetence is reaching so far as to actually burn my fair nostrils, so I went to do penance for the untenable ignorance running rampant in the world at the Church of San Marco (where our boy Pico della Mirandola* is buried, natch). Anyway, as I was walking towards the plane under the solemn dark blue sky, kicking away truculent gnomes hellbent on selling their subterranean smack to poor, unsuspecting tourists, I noticed the constellation of Orion.

Now as you may know, almost everything in the heavens (aside from the space junk soon to rain down on your unwitting heads) has been named after mythical figures. In Greek myth Orion was a renowned hunter and according to some, a giant. Stories on his birth and death vary, as is usual in mythology, and by now you should now why that is. "Because it is not the continuity but the symbolism that counts?" Yes, that is correct anonymous internet fiend! So according to Hesiod (or actually according to some guy saying that Hesiod said it) Orion was the son of Euryale (the daughter of Minos) and Poseidon, the god of the sea, from whom he received the power to walk on water.** When Orion was drunk, he managed to offend someone, and in those days apparently you were blinded for such an insult. So he was blind. Then he was healed. By Helios. The sun god. Was it necessary to tell that? Beats me.

Anyhow, eyesight back, Orion goes to Krete to hunt with the goddess Artemis and her mother Leto, and threatens to get a little carried away because he actually wants to kill every animal on earth. In those days people didn't like that kind of stuff and they would kill you for it. So Gaia (the Earth) sent a giant scorpion which stung and killed him. Artemis and Leto thereafter pledged with Zeus to have him immortalized in the heavens, and Zeus, who wasn't quite immune to (fe)male charm anyway, relented and turned Orion and the scorpion into constellations, each one setting as the other rises. In the Illiad, Homer mentions that Orion is furthermore accompanied by his loyal dog Seirios, which we know as the star Sirius.

There's also all kinds of theories about Orion and Giza's pyramids, and about myths being storied versions of celestial phenomena, but I will try to get into that next time.

Man, I also keep on forgetting to talk about that kid they found in Germany roaming the forests, who is supposed to have lived in the wild for years (chomp on that, Christopher McCandless). Made me think about this killer Rainbow track:

Ritchie Blackmore used to be one of my idols. Just like I am yours now. 

Thanks for visiting. Come back soon.

*Who he? Foul, uncouth barbarian! Go look at all the posts I did on this marvel of philosophy on the double! If you're new to the site: welcome.

**I'm not quite sure if that's also where Jesus picked up this trick, but maybe we'll try to get into that another time, god willing. Bwahaha.

Greece For Sale

Statue of Ploutos and the cornucopia, or the horn of plenty.

Man, there’s so many stuff to talk about once you actually start paying attention to the news. There’s still turmoil about Greece, who is trying to secure another 8 billion loan from the IMF, and other miscellaneous financial babbling. Did you know that Greece is one of the only cultures to actually possess a god related to wealth and riches? I guess avarice is just hardwired into their genetics somehow. And no, before all you fumbling classicists start to think that I’m talking about Haides (which in all fairness is an honest mistake to make since you are nowhere near sufficiently enlightened, that is why you’re reading this dazzling digital publication, after all), I’m not.

I found out from theoi.com that there was a Ploutos, the son of Iason and Demeter, and the personification of wealth. Zeus blinded the poor guy just so he would distribute capital fortune evenly and without any disposition towards the good and virtuous. How egalitarian of those ancient Greeks, eh? Of course, if you’re pious you don’t need earthly riches, you just crave the supernatural abundance of divine grace and perhaps the security of a profitable spot in the paradisial afterlife, which is filled to burst with spiritual prosperity anyway. Well, keep reading and you might just get there.

Now we arrive at Haides, the god of the underworld and the dead, who carried the title Plouton, “lord of riches”, seeing as how below the surface of the earth all kinds of unimaginable treasures were stored. Haides was therefore normally depicted with a cornucopia that sprouted fertility, as was Ploutos. So hey, my advice to the Greeks is: start digging and stop begging.

Haides! With a cornucopia! Pouring fertility! On the earth! Next to him Persephone! His wife! Theoi.com!? Never heard of it!

A New Era Begins

Peter Paul Rubens, "The Rape of Europa", c.1630

And once again you have managed to struggle yourself through the endless piles of worthless chattering and inane stupidities that comprise the world wide web in order to reach this safe haven of intellectual bliss and spiritual tranquillity. And how opportune of you to do so at this very moment, for I am on the verge of starting a new chapter of grandeur and mind-boggling excellence on this already revered outpost of the information interstate. I have declared myself ready and willing to start tackling current day affairs and relate them to the wondrous world of myth, so that the gratitude and astonishment will now spew forth in unstoppable tidal waves from your menial craniums.

So let’s talk for a moment about Greece, which apparently is on the verge of bankruptcy despite the endless drones of sweaty, overweight tourists that penetrate its glorious borders like a pack of hungry Ethiopians descending on a Red Cross emergency provisions-tent. It seems that every day I open the paper there is a DEFCON-2 situation and concern about the state of Greece and subsequently the Euro. Let me tell all you EU-outsiders about the Euro: best thing to have happened on this piece of land since the domestication of cows. Anyway, I really don’t care about all that moaning about the economy and the disarray in the financial markets and since you are here, I’m guessing you don’t either. Or otherwise you just have not learned how to prioritize better, but a quick read of all the previous posts will then suffice to set you straight and will have you falling on your knees in pious supplication in no time.

Like all the other EU-countries, we Dutch people have pumped quite a substantial amount of money into Greece, lest it would collapse and, like a domino, take a bunch of surrounding countries with it. ITALY, SPAIN, ANATOLIA, PHRYGIA: ALL IN DANGER! Well, Anatolia and Phrygia used to make up most of Turkey, but you catch my drift. Of course, no sane person since Dwight Eisenhower has believed in the domino theory, yet here we are regardless. In these perilous times our own fragile economy should take precedence and so the question buzzing all around is: should we invest money that we’re likely to never see back in Greece and other ailing countries such as Italy and Spain? (Their financial problems have something to do with national debt and liquidity-solvability processes I think, but you’d have to ask J.M. Keynes to be sure) To all this I answer with a Herakleian YES, we should! Greece’s cultural heritage alone makes up 50% of the historical canon of Europe (remember that it was named after the helpless Phoenician princess that was kidnapped by Zeus as he was in the shape of a white bull, so he could indulge in some supernaturally sanctioned bestiality) and I recall that there was a time that everybody wanted to roam in the jaunty abodes of Arcadia.

If you ask me, the UK should just transfer some hefty sums of hard cash to poor Greece’s empty account, in order to make up for all those treasures they so remorselessly stole and shamelessly put on display in the British Museum in order to give some more luster to their own destitute society.

So, what have we learned today? Economics is boring and this blog still rules the stars.

Food for thought.

Exit Pico

It's a Medici and co. bingo, baby, butter and beans birthday bash in Sandro Botticelli's "Adoration of the Magi" (1476)! Left in the foreground are (left to right) Lorenzo de' Medici, Angelo Poliziano and, who else, Pico! There's more of course, but I won't bother you with that. (That's cultivated tone for FIND IT OUT YOURSELF).

Ultimately, for Pico it is the entire human soul, posited at the centre of creation and partaking in every type of being, that is daimonic[1]. It is capable of informing itself regarding the numinous destiny of mankind, but it also needs to recognize its own uniqueness, which it does by a thorough understanding of the Christian revelation and Scripture. Pico thus both differs and agrees with traditional uses of the word “daimon”. On the one hand, ritual practices of meditation are aimed at the investigation of the celestial hierarchies, but on the other hand these hierarchies and spirits serve solely as models for the rational soul to emulate. The liberty of the human soul to move up and down the cosmic staircase of reality reflects Pico’s belief that man is not necessarily subjected to the wiles of fate but possesses the ability to take control of his own destiny. Essentially, Pico proposes that man can become part of God because human nature lacks the metaphysical principle of limitation that confines beings to one fixed mode of existence. Thus, we share in the same ontological freedom of God. That this freedom is inherent but still has to be attained, Pico makes clear in the necessity to take up his fourfold program of philosophy and by underlining the supernatural grace that we have received from Jesus.

If Pico’s beliefs come across as alien to us today, we would do well to remember that in the Renaissance the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical were decidedly more porous than they are today. The strict opposition in quality between mind and body that Descartes introduced, and that in some form still pervades to this day, was not something that was considered in the premodern world. Even though Pico believed that the soul should release itself from the body in order to become one with God, he would have also maintained, like all Christians, that the soul would be reunited with the body at the end of time.  Pico’s aim at deification does not depend on a strict renunciation of the material reality, precisely because this dimension is as intrinsically important to human nature as its other components. The reality of material things had its origin the spiritual world and so the dualism that we adhere to in our own time was not even an  issue in those days. Spiritual substances and occult virtues and qualities accounted not only for the way in which nature worked, but also served as an important starting point through which religious truths could be deduced. For most philosophers, and especially Pico, theological meaning was the be-all/end-all of their work. Descartes may not have intended it, but his mechanical philosophy, together with the rise of mathematical science, gave way to a new understanding of nature, its being and its operation. Pico, however, was blissfully unaware of all this, and though many scholars have tried to claim him as an inevitable forebode of the rise of natural science, his proper place in the tumultuous world of the Renaissance is secure.

And even though Pico was no religious reformer, he did want to promote a new kind of spirituality free from strife and conflict. His proposed program of study and contemplation would help calm and assuage the fears and doubts of people, while working towards a new kind of peace for the soul built on natural magic and the true felicity of God.

There! Don’t you feel intellectually mollified and mentally appeased! Now you can finally look in the mirror again and don’t feel the overwhelming urge to publically chastise yourself and humbly prostrate your inapt person before the grand altar of this Blog (capital B for “cosmic revelatory quality”, natch!), although you might want to continue doing that, because next time is going to be the start of something great and unbelievable! Be here as I will take this blog into new spheres of heavenly excellence and fresh, unexpected territories!

---

[1] Well, you know, this paper was written for a conference called “Daimonic Imagination, Uncanny Intelligence”. Did I even bother to explain what it exactly is? Anyway, in ancient days daimons were divine/semi-divine entities that were responsible for the intellectual and spiritual guidance of people. Of course today we don’t need that anymore, because my blog wholly provides for mankind in this immense and unfailing task. I used the word “daimonic” to signify Pico’s view of the human soul as capable of transcending the material bounds of nature and spiritually illuminating itself. But your soul cannot do this, otherwise you would not be here.....

End In Sight

Edit: Apparently I had already used the image that was here first, and even though my caption was mildly entertaining, I chose to take it away. All for your continued enjoyment and spiritual purification. I aim to please.

There is much more of this sort of spiritual arithmetic (the technique was normally called gematria) to be found in Kabbalah that strengthened Pico in his belief that it was the most holy practice of magic, and in fact formed the groundwork for the miracles of Christ. Language is the most potent part of magic, because it is God’s speech that informs and moves nature, and magic has power only in so far as it is shaped by God’s voice. But not only letters and numbers were important, also the shapes of letters (some Hebrew letters had to be either “open” or “closed” depending on their position in a word or sentence) served to confirm the awesome divinity of the Torah and God. A blueprint for Pico’s own theory of deification could also be found in Kabbalah. After all, it was the apocryphal Enoch who was turned into the “angel of divinity” Metatron according to the Kabbalists and Pico refers to this when discussing the possibility of being reborn into the world of the intellect as an angel after dying in the sensible world.

Nevertheless, also the Kabbalist had to be careful to practise his gematria in a pious manner, for those who failed to do this would be pounced upon by the fallen angel Azazel, who for Pico symbolized the unclean forces in our reality. The mystical union that Pico espoused, and wanted to make known to the theological world in Rome in 1487, runs like a thread throughout his work and finds it origin for an important part in the Kabbalah. Pico’s theses are replete with numerological symbolism (the final section consists of 72 conclusions), as are other works such as Heptaplus and On Being and the One (1491). The number 900 is no coincidence therefore, because for Pico it was “the symbol of the excited soul turning back into itself through the frenzy of the muses”, as he gushes in a letter to Benivieni. It had driven Pico to meditate on the passage of the Gospel of John which foretells the coming of the Holy Spirit and the peace and enlightenment it will bring along with it. This peace was what Pico wanted to establish trough his Christo-syncretic reading of all cultures, and bring to its spiritual end through the death of the kiss.

           

Pico’s methodology was thus fully pious in its aims and practices. Through Kabbalah Pico believed to have recovered the true path towards union with God. Furthermore, it is the rational soul that makes mystical union possible and by taking its inspiration from revelation and careful contemplation this defining part of human nature can properly ascend the heavenly ladder by imitating the angels that are part of the divine intellect illuminating man. However, the intellect is both something inherent to human beings, as we have seen, and a higher level of reality which beckons and inspires us. Imaginative and meditative practice on this reality, and the material world as well, is necessary to recognize our own share in divinity. Moral philosophy, dialectic, natural philosophy and theology, then, are the proper steps to take when we want to begin the journey towards holy unification.

The activation of the intellect, however, is no easy affair. It relies on a total disengagement from the senses (indeed, we have to leave the entire body behind) and can only be attempted by those sufficiently enlightened. The life of the angels is therefore exemplary. By imitating them and calling on their power, our rational soul can break free from the body and reach into the sphere of the intellect. But as much as Pico stresses the need to mimic the ways of the angels, we eventually move upwards by our own strength, as we possess everything necessary to do so already by ourselves. Moreover, even though the angels may be the inhabitants of a higher plane of reality, this does not mean that they are higher in the cosmic hierarchy than humans. As Pico cautions, angels do not exist by themselves and also do not understand by themselves.  They draw their being, life and perfection from God, and as such they only participate in being.

So even though angels illuminate our soul, we are eventually elevated over them by way of Jesus Christ. As Jesus was the full embodiment of divinity we possess the grace to go beyond the angels and become one with being itself. So as the rational soul is the instrument through which we can cultivate our imagination and rise to God, the intellect that informs it is both a spiritual force coming from within as well as without.

Hang in there, overzealous wisdom herbivores! Next thursday the concluding chapter of the Pico-saga, and then we will move on to higher planes of understanding and intelligence!

Keep On Pico-ing

The graves of Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano at the church of San Marco, Florence. Below a statue of Girolamo Savonarola.

 

From Saint Paul (actually Pseudo-Dionysius, who in that time was generally taken to be  Dionysius the judge of Athens who was converted by Saint Paul in Acts 17:34[1]) Pico takes his cue on the activity of the cherubim who are purged and illuminated prior to being perfected. Continuing, he recounts the dream that the patriarch Jacob had of the ladder to heaven, with angels moving up and down its steps, while on the run from his brother Esau. If we want to be able to tread on this ladder, Pico says, we have to make sure we are pure, because it is sacrilege to touch that which is holy with dirty feet or unwashed hands. So first, we have to purge ourselves of moral impurities like base desires and sensual passions through the study of moral philosophy. Second, to be able to move freely to and from the various rings of existence, we have to dispel our ignorance and train our sense of reason to properly recognize truth and deception through dialectic. Third, we have to study natural philosophy, in order to come to a closer understanding of the wonders of nature and the workings of God. This is an important step, because at the heart of religion is the “assiduous contemplation of the wonders of God.” Finally, after completing these three steps one is fully prepared for theology, the knowledge of divine things, which in turn will lead to ultimate peace by way of the annihilation of the one in the eternal Source of all existence.

Pico thus proposes a regimen that mirrors the Cherubic way of life, purifying, illuminating and perfecting the human soul, and eventually mimics the Seraphic state of being, namely total consummation in the Godhead. The goal for Pico is the Kabbalistic “death of the kiss”, an ecstatic state whereby the soul has freed itself of its material bonds and becomes one with immaterial nature.

           

Now what were the practical ways of achieving this? The easy answer would be to study copiously everything that Pico had done, as the clarification of his methods aims for a large part at its subsequent justification. In fact, there is already an important dimension to be found in the quadripartite division of Pico’s curriculum. Such a fourfold structure recalls the Pythagorean tetractys, a triangular figure consisting of ten dots spread across four rows, descending (or ascending) from four to three to two to one, and a cosmic symbol of considerable spiritual power. The figure of the tetractys can become an important medium for contemplative practice or an amulet of magical power when infused with numerological exercises and juggling with Hebrew letters, pet subjects of the Kabbalah. Hebrew, as the original language of the Bible and by extension God, is therefore the proper instrument through which this kind of natural magic should be conducted. Here the allure of Kabbalah to Pico starts to become clear: letters, words, phrases and numbers are at the core of this mystical tradition, and since every letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a numerological value, the potential to derive hidden meanings from Scripture by calculating the arithmetic of holy names and utterances becomes virtually limitless.

Example of a "tetractys"

Devotees of the Kabbalah considered Hebrew letters to be the roots of the universe (in the end, it is through speech that everything is created in Genesis 1), and so their alterations and interchangeability with each other and the names of God was a prime ritual of meditative ecstasy. Moreover, in Pico’s day many Christians were concerned with words and meanings as they were found in the Bible. Biblical language was thought to not only work in a descriptive way, but also as the grounds on which the reality of things was built: words signified the objects that they were.

For Jews the most holy name of God was the Tetragrammaton (YHWH), strictly forbidden to be uttered and consisting of the letters yodh (י), he (ה), waw (ו), he. These letters corresponded respectively to the numerical values of  10, 5, and 6, thus giving a total value of the name as 26. However, such simple arithmetic did not sufficiently satisfy the mystic and to cumulatively add the numbers (10 (yodh) +10+5 (yodh & he), and so on), carried even more spiritual power, yielding the total of 72, which related to the number of letters that made up the true name of God and which only the most skilled Kabbalist could hope to discover . Going further still, to represent the letters in the tetractys splendidly confirmed the sacred unity of the name. Putting yodh at the first four points results in 40 (10+10+10+10), he at the second three in 15, waw at the third row of two in 12 and he again at the last point simply makes up 5. Adding these together then, amounted again to 72. Cue divine frenzy and spiritual illumination. 

 Tetractys with the Tetragrammaton. Man, did you wish you had payed better attention to what I wrote instead of just glaring at the pretty pictures.

Still hanging in there? I’m wrapping this one up pretty soon so that you can begin to bathe in the heavenly glory of my unimaginable (save by he who has experienced the proper mode of spiritual electrifying illumination; you know, like John Travolta...) brilliance post-haste!

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[1] Remember that question you had 4 days back about who the hell this guy was? Answered!

On The Soul & Kidnapping

Part of a fresco from the church of San Ambrogio in Firenze, depicting Pico as he's being flanked by his jolly good friends Angelo Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino. I gotta tell ya, it's getting harder and harder to find decent pictures of the guy....

Though Pico’s ontology of the human species is not always consistent, it does follow a certain kind of inner logic. For example, in his earliest written work, a commentary on his friend Girolamo Benivieni’s poem Canzone d’Amore[1], Pico distinguishes between four specific parts that make up the human soul: the vegetative, the sensitive, the rational, and the intellectual. The Oration, written shortly afterward in this period of exceptional productivity that Pico would never again match, confirms this fourfold division, while stressing that it is the unity of man which participates in the nature and essence of all creation that allows him to be “made one with God.”

In the Heptaplus Pico lays out a more elaborate scheme of human nature, consisting of (1) the mortal body; (2) the rational soul; (3) an intervening spirit which serves to connect the soul and the body; (4) the intermediate sensual part we share with the brutes; and (5) the intelligence we share with the angels. Elsewhere in the Heptaplus Pico describes man as being made up of “a body compounded from the elements, and a heavenly spirit, and the vegetative soul of plants, and the sense of brutes, and reason, and the angelic mind, and the likeness of God.” What Pico thus identifies as essential in a human being are the characteristics we share with beings higher than ourselves (angels) and creatures on a lower step of the ladder (plants, animals), those characteristics being the intellect in the case of angels, and the vegetative soul and senses in the case of lower beings. Sometimes Pico mentions these last two together and sometimes not, being content to simply point out that we have something in common with higher as well as lower nature.

Furthermore, there is the unity of God that we emulate, and through which we are able to ultimately achieve the desired deification. Specifically, it is through Jesus Christ that the invisible God is united with His creation. The spirit that Pico talks about seems to be the spirit of life (Pico also equates it with “light”), since without it the heavens could not impart the benefits of life and motion on us. What peculiar to the human being is the rational soul, and it is through this faculty that henosis (A Neoplatonic term connoting union with the One or the ultimate Source) is achieved.

Pico departs from the accepted Aristotelian and scholastic notions which hold that reason is the highest faculty of the soul and follows the Platonists in positing an intellectual or angelic part above the rational. Through this distinction Pico is able to adhere to the Averroistic’ notion of the unicity of the intellect.[2] The Arabic philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198) became quite notorious in the Renaissance with his theory that there is only one shared intellect for all human beings, which caused many disputes among philosophers regarding the perceived merit of this theorem. Philosophically, it was quite attractive, for it could explain the universality of intellectual knowledge, but theologically it was untenable, because it seemed to imply that there was no personal immortality after the death of the material body. Such a matter was central to Renaissance philosophy, because it touched on major questions like the eternity of truth and the capacity of the human mind to grasp this, and the way to account for human behaviour and morality.

The immortality of the soul, the defining mark of humanity, was essential to the salvation of mankind and demonstrates the inescapable link between philosophy and theology, the former often working to strengthen the latter. By positing the rational soul as the fundamental feature of human nature, Pico handily circumvents this problem. The rational soul, the medium trough which we reach to God, is personal and immortal, while the intellect provides reason with the impulse to reach above itself and strive to unity with God. What Pico thus seems to postulate is that the divine intellect illumines our soul, which eventually endeavours to go even beyond this and reach its ultimate source, God.

           

But as stated before, owing to the pull of sensual appetites the rational soul will not climb upwards to the highest chambers of heaven by its own accord, but needs to be expressly cultivated and Pico proposes a rigorous program for this. After all, “nothing can rise above itself by relying on its own strength” (Heptaplus), and the person attempting to do so has to be sagacious and morally worthy. The count of Mirandola therefore draws up a four part program, echoing the doctrines of the psychological, moral, mystical and ritual aims of philosophy expounded by Neoplatonists and early Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria. Simply put, we have to “compete with the angels in dignity and glory” and emulate the ways of highest three orders of angels, namely the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. So we have to be of worthy opinion like the throne, who “stands in steadfastness of judgment”; of contemplative insight as the cherub, who “shines with the radiance of intelligence”; and finally, of proper dedication and love for God like the seraph, who “burns with the fire of charity” (all quotes from the Oration, as if you hadn’t guessed). Pico then moves to illustrate his curriculum by example of Saint Paul and Jacob, and fortifies it by showing its continuity with many other traditions of wisdom, such as that of the Pythagoreans, Plato and the Chaldeans.

Wow. We’re heading into truly glorious abodes now. Better wear some sunglasses or something like that next time so as not to be blinded by the sheer and utter brilliance erupting from you screen! Hoho.

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[1] Pico composed this work between 10 May 1486 and 10 September 1486, after he had tried to kidnap a certain Margherita, a wealthy widow who had just remarried a minor de’Medici, but a Medici nonetheless, in Arezzo. Accounts on Margherita’s supposed willingness vary (Pico’s sister swore the lady followed her brother voluntarily), but in any case the young count was caught right before reaching Siena and was lucky to escape with his life. Pico’s retinue was not so lucky however, as some eye-witnesses held that eighteen of his men bit the dust following the reckless episode. All the same, Lorenzo de’Medici was quick to forgive this crime and Pico returned with a pious zeal to his studies.

[2] Pico states this adherence in theses 2>73 & 3>67-69. Actually belonging to the 400 statements that he presented as “not his own”, Pico amplifies Averroes’ claims in such a way as to make them his personal interpretation and it seems likely that he intended to demonstrate the concord of Averroes with Aristotelianism and Christianity.