A Contested Site
Pico della Mirandola was a late fifteenth-century Italian nobleman-philosopher with an interest in religious reform who died young under mysterious circumstances. He is part of a milieu that we quickly recognize when we think of the Italian Renaissance whether historically or within the history of ideas. Pico lived and worked in places such as Florence, Padua, and Ferrara. He was friends with the great Platonist Marsilio Ficino, with the humanist and poet Angelo Poliziano, and the major Aristotelian reformers of his generation such as Augustino Nifo as well as the eminence grise of Christian reform, Girolamo Savonarola. He was close to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Estes, the Sforzas, probably the King of France, and famously feuded with the pope. Pico’s use of Jewish Kabbalism introduced a new and ongoing strand to Christian esoterica. Obviously, Pico is so much more than this—but beyond basic facts, the story of Pico and his intellectual legacy is highly contested.
Indeed, the level of Pico’s fame in Italy and France both then and now sometimes seems out of proportion to his limited output with multiple grandiose characterizations, whether in popular culture or academia: Pico the hero philosopher-prince,1 the count with the miraculous memory; St. Pico, the nobleman-penitent who gave everything away to die closer to God; in academic circles, Pico the lone genius whose work prefigures the modern individual: the philosopher who requires us to understand ‘the Renaissance’ as the precursor to ‘Enlightenment’; the shining star of Ficino’s Platonic Academy; or, much like Coleridge in England, the last person to know everything.
Pico’s personality2 and ambition capture the grandiosity of the Italian Renaissance of our imagination. He loudly declared his intention to bring together the whole history of philosophy into one ‘concordance,’ used his wealth and status to challenge all-comers to debate him publicly at his own expense, sought a way to reconcile the humanities with theology and philosophy while pushing for radical religious change, and skirted danger and intrigue (fleeing the pope’s rage, abducting the object of his desire) eventually leading to his probable murder. He provides us with the glittering physical and intellectual spectacle of the Renaissance: if others were attempting to lead a revival of the Golden Age, Pico appears to embody that Age in his own person and his promised work. The ‘world’ of Pico is a place where young men are mythical demi-Gods, where the nobility read Plato, where the learned men of the past converse easily with each other, and where everybody has understood rationally, and through an act of faith, that Christ is their only savior. Pico himself promoted a certain vision of his career—self-fashioning his uniqueness, promising to be part of every intellectual ‘camp’ while principally of none, and while others’ accounts contest his self-fashioning, they do so only to claim him for their own. Inevitably his early death with most major projects unfinished deepens the fascination. We cannot know what he might have done and what marvels he may have produced.
His work centers on three major projects: a poetic theology,3 an attempt to bring together the entire history of philosophy, and a concordance between Aristotle and Plato. These could have been three separate projects, or one to two that metamorphosed and were renamed as his thinking developed. Each project reflects central conflicts of the period that he wished to overcome between literary studies and philosophy; between Plato and Aristotle; and, most importantly, between faith and reason. He believed that a theological philosophy was possible, bringing faith and reason together to reinvigorate Christianity. But as most of this work was never completed, Pico’s vision must be in part assumed based on partial glimpses—whether on the nature of the Intellect, or the place of the human in his universe.
The combination of a partially drawn vision, our complex perceptions of ‘Italian Renaissance,’ Pico’s unfulfilled promise, potent self-fashioning, and early and ongoing disagreement over his legacy inevitably makes ‘Pico the philosopher’ a contested domain. To re-evaluate his work and vision, we need to set aside at least part of the glitz, test historical readings, and re-explore his oeuvre and influences, while appreciating that there is no neutral perspective or single truth to be found.
This work offers four related major re-evaluations. First Pico’s work is in the main coherent and contiguous (despite the fragments and occasional changes of direction),4 thereby making it at least possible to delineate his partial vision of the universe and our place within it. Secondly, Pico’s approach is based on three principle traditions—the three pillars for his universe: Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Jewish Kabbalism.5 Thirdly, his attempt at concordance between these three pillars is successful when it builds on similarities/shared histories but inevitably reveals significant difference, so that creation is complicated by the comparison with emanation and the God of negative theology cannot be the pleroma. Fourthly, unlike Ficino with his mission of renovatio, Pico is an exceptionalist focused on a solitary ascetic mystical journey to a form of henosis with God but with no plan for return. The combination of Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Kabbalism require something more complex than Platonic henosis. This union is a ‘cleaving’ not with a wholly transcendent One, but with its active attribute/s within our universe, starting with those attributes associated with mind and understanding. In Pico, henosis can also be a noetic process, where our minds touch the mind of the Aristotelian active intellect. The nous, or mind, is reappropriated for mystical experience. The exceptionalism of Pico’s philosophy even excludes the importance of a knowledge network or academic entourage that he built around himself. Pico’s philosophy is a type of theological philosophy, similar to his colleague, Marsilio Ficino, but centered on the exceptionalism of the individual and even more ascetically mystical, occupying the borderlands between philosophy and mysticism.
Alongside these reassessments, we will revisit other key assumptions around the critical reception of his work. Of these, a few examples here suffice. From a class perspective, Pico’s social position as a noble with a large personal fortune connected to the most prominent families in northern and central Italy both augmented his career and has obscured the contribution of others. Obviously, his status made his choice of career highly unusual: he was automatically important, and his interest in being a philosopher (rather than a statesman with scholarly hobbies) makes him unique.6 So he reconstructed the concept of philosopher for his own purposes arguing that a philosopher should be a gentleman who does not need to philosophize for money.7 The consequences of his social position are many. He was able to attempt a public launch of his career in Rome and when he came to a city, people remembered the brilliant young count. For Pico, his self-publicity tended toward solipsism, and those who continued the story of the brilliant count after his death utilized that publicity, from his extraordinary breadth of knowledge, his use of previously untranslated sources, to his intellectual reach. This was to a certain extent true but also ignores the contribution of those around him to the body of work he produced. His wealth and social standing allowed the purchase and fostering of translators, mentors, and teachers. Pico was not a solitary individual; he was the center of an academic court or entourage.
Another ‘key assumption’: as part of the discourse of modernity, we have tended to look for the ‘modern’ or at least ‘proto-modern’ in our past in order to achieve a direct narrative (a linearity of cause and effect) that takes us from there to here. We want our story. The Romans are part of our conversation because they invented roads, aqueducts and concrete: they lead to us. Those ‘in-between’ are the Dark Ages—something murky, not understandable, to be ignored as external to the narrative of human development. The most popular and recognizable work of Pico’s oeuvre remains a speech that he wrote to preface his grand debate in Rome. The speech has become known as the ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man.’ In the twentieth century it was popularly read as a proto-modern announcement of the modern individual: a triumphant description of a new person that we could recognize as ourselves. But when reading Pico’s speech in this manner, we fail to recognize that the ‘Dignity of Man ’ is not even the main topic of the speech. Rather, we are expressing a modernist desire to reappropriate the different and the foreign, and expand our notion of ‘modern’ to the point where the Renaissance propels us into or simply exists as the waiting room for modernity rather than as a liminal space or a coherent moment p...