Yes, Pico was of such precocious intelligence that he was already reading when others were still happily soiling their undergarments! Unlike you, who is doing so now whilst reading this splendid weblog.
All in all, we should do well to remember that when we enter the world of Pico della Mirandola, we enter a world profoundly different from ours. The Renaissance remains a difficult period to assess because its name alone presupposes a grand resurgence in the Western mind as it endeavours to reinstate itself in the inevitable journey towards cultural adulthood. However, it would be wrong to attempt to explain away notions of irrationality that fail to satisfy our modern understanding as unfortunate by-products of the not-yet cultivated Renaissance intellect that was on the way to attaining objective, scientific insight, but had to achieve this through trial and error. The point is that in the premodern period the cosmos still existed of many occult powers and that a closer understanding of these forces was propagated not in a sustained attempt to dispel them, but in order to better understand them and participate in their governance of the world, and eventually through this to come to a closer apprehension of the ways and beauty of God. For example, even though the Italian philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525) wanted to banish the belief that miracles were wrought on nature by angels and demons, he still believed that changes in the material world were caused by the occult qualities of certain stones, the torpedo fish (electric ray) and other miscellaneous objects.
Furthermore, the time that Pico lived in was one of profound political turmoil. Florence, Pico’s final resting place, was never free from internal conflict and the volatile rule of the Medici would collapse shortly after Pico’s death, fuelled in part by the fervent preaching of Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), the firebrand Dominican preacher whose teachings Pico had started to adhere to fanatically. Moreover, the entire Italian peninsula was marked by political instability. On the day Pico died, the French king Charles VIII entered the city, occupying it as he passed through it on his quest to claim the kingdom of Naples. Charles had been prompted into this by Innocent VIII and the Duke of Milan, but also in part by Piero the Unfortunate, Lorenzo de’Medici’s son and heir, who promised him safe passage through Tuscany. That alliances at the time were more than fluid becomes apparent in the fact that as soon as Charles VIII had conquered the crown of Naples, Milan joined the anti-French coalition, the League of Venice, spearheaded by Pope Alexander VI who wanted to get rid of the French in order to secure some prosperous fiefdoms for his children.
As an answer to all this, Pico wanted to establish a purer and more original form of Christianity and re-examine the dogmatic particulars of ecclesiastical doctrine. What set Pico apart from other humanists was his use of Kabbalah and his willingness to include scholastic reasoning in his philosophizing, a “barbaric” style that his humanist friends like Angelo Poliziano and Ermolao Barbaro (he himself was well aware of the irony of his name) scoffed at. Through the practices of Kabbalah and the theurgy of Neoplatonists and Christian mystics alike, Pico himself also aimed at a transcendental stepping beyond the material world to attain blissful, mystical union with the Godhead. Concretely, what Kabbalah offered to Pico was its rich tradition of Biblical exegesis, numerology and spiritual meditation on divine names, letters and shapes. In Heptaplus (1489) Pico offers his own Kabbalistic method of interpreting the first chapter of Genesis. The Hebrew word Beresit or berescith (“In the beginning”) is after some adding and subtracting of its Hebrew letters to form other words taken to signify: “The father, in the Son and through the Son, the beginning and end or rest, created the head, the fire, and the foundation of the great man with a good pact.” (Pico, Heptaplus) While such a laborious reading of one word might seem excessive to the casual reader it is in fact common practice for the Kabbalist, for whom this type of exegesis was a spiritual exercise intended to bring the human mind into closer communion with God. Kabbalah is foremost an interpretive mode of scriptural investigation which holds to the belief that nothing in the Torah, not even the smallest change in a letter at a particular point, lacks a deeper theological meaning.
Pico thus found in Kabbalah a welcome aid for his own spiritual purposes, namely facilitating a return to the ultimate origin of the human soul: God. Kabbalah worked as a sort of second revelation. As language is one of the chief vehicles of magic, it follows that the speech of God, in the original Hebrew, is exceptionally potent. Pico thought that in addition to the written law, Moses also received the true interpretation of this law by God while on Mount Sinai, which he was forbidden to disclose openly, but cleverly disguised “under the shell and raw face of the words”. The merit of Kabbalah was twofold for Pico: first, it ratified his belief in the prominence of Scripture as the basis for faith, because it gave access to the proper, divine way of speaking that was to be found in the Bible. Second, it confirmed his notion of the prisca theologia[1], seeing as how Moses was prohibited from mentioning the spiritual law in his writing, he did manage to transmit it orally to a succession of sages (like Zoroaster, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato etc.), which accounted for the principal concord of all religious and philosophical traditions with the Christian doctrine. Or at least it did in Pico’s view.[2]
[1] Pico’s philosophical sparring partner, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), was also enamoured with this idea, though he would frequently alter the order and appearance of his favourite “wise men”.
[2] Pico, who’s secondary aristocratic title was count of Concord, considered it his life’s work to account for the basic concord of all wisdom traditions in the light of Christianity. The conjuncture of Pico’s title with his activity only served as further confirmation of the piousness of his enterprise to him and his friends.
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