It's our boy Pico!
The controversy surrounding Pico’s 900 theses and the Apology (1487) that he wrote to defend them poignantly reflects the religious and intellectual climate of the Renaissance. The authority of the Church, and by extension the Pope, Christ’s vicar on earth, was unquestionable and even though some tensions were beginning to show (particularly concerning the sometimes undutiful ways of ecclesiastical authority; Innocent VIII himself had two illegitimate children and frequently sold papal offices to the highest bidder) the revelation of Jesus Christ proved impossible to abandon. Of course, things would come to a head with the Reformation (1517), but even then the desire was to rebirth Christianity and not to remove religion from its dominant sphere of influence. At the time, philosophy was primarily an educative and intellectual discipline and it was used to account for the existing harmony between divine and natural law and the possibility of applying this to the order of society. It was believed that God’s order revealed itself as much in nature as it did in revelation. Despite the advent of (Neo)Platonism, spurred on by the large scale retrieval of ancient manuscripts that characterized the Renaissance, the dominant authority on matters of ethics and metaphysics remained Aristotle, whose theories had been adapted to serve Christendom by Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and were still being fine-tuned by many new appearing commentaries and translations. In a sense, Renaissance Aristotelianism stimulated the scientific approach to nature by promoting a deduction from effects to causes, though the empirical science that we know today is a far cry from the sort of experiential investigation that the natural philosophers of the Renaissance practised.
Furthermore, there was the matter of magic. This was widely considered to be a serious concern and not some trivial topic of fickle self-deception or mass hallucination. Church rituals and liturgical practices, such as the Eucharist, are common examples of customs that were considered to be magical, although there was also the feared shadow side of magic, which included demonolatry and necromancy. It is no coincidence that during Pico’s heyday the Malleus Malificarum (1487), describing the malign and diabolic practices of witches, also appeared. Pico therefore took pains to distinguish his method of “natural magic” from the shameless invocation of evil demons and spirits for strictly material aims:
“I have proposed theorems about magic, too, wherein I have signified that magic is twofold. The first sort is put together by the work and authorship of demons, and is a thing, as God is true, execrable and monstrous. The other sort is, when well explored, nothing but the absolute consummation of the philosophy of nature.” (Pico, "On the Dignity of Man")
Pico’s magic, as he states to protect himself from possible accusations of demonolatry and heresy, works by marrying earth to heaven, that is, bringing together scattered forces in nature and activating them through infusion with divine virtue, and is ultimately grounded in God’s grace. The Catholic Church would often condemn magical acts because they were believed to infringe on official, sanctioned religious practices and just as often Protestants denounced Roman Catholic rituals as “demonic”. It is not surprising that in such a climate the legend of Faust would soar to extraordinary heights of popularity. The dabbling of the unfortunate doctor of theology in powers beyond his understanding and his arrogant zeal to subjugate nature to his very whim tellingly reflects the dominant mores of the time, underlining the ultimate authority of the Church and the limits of the human intellect that still has to bow to the providence and supremacy of God.
More coming soon! For real!
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