BOOK: Pico della Mirandola, "Oration"

Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola: Life of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Oration. Edited and translated by Brian P. Copenhaver. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 93. Harvard University Press, 2022. 9780674023420. lxxxvii + 330 pp.

Well, this was certainly a wild ride. To be honest, I had been just barely aware of the two Picos before reading this book, so on the one hand I did learn a few new things from it; but on the other hand it was one of the more incomprehensible volumes in the ITRL series so far, and that's a contest with no small an amount of competition. Giovanni Pico was the famous philosopher whom I, like I suppose everyone else, vaguely knew as the author of the Oration on Human Dignity, which forms the second half or so of the present volume; Gianfrancesco Pico, as it turns out, was Giovanni's nephew and biographer whose Life of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola forms the first half the book. (Interestingly, Gianfrancesco was only six years younger than his uncle, being the son of one of Giovanni's much older brothers.)

The translator's introduction

The book starts with an introduction by the translator, Brian Copenhaver, which is longer than usually in the ITRL series. I found some parts of it extremely interesting, and indeed surprising: it turns out that Giovanni Pico's oration was not originally called the Oration on Human Dignity at all; that he barely mentions the word dignitas in it; that the oration was explicitly linked with it only in 1504, well after his death, by an editor of a new edition of his works (p. xxxvi); and that in any case the meaning of this Latin word, either in ancient times or in the renaissance, didn't really correspond to our modern-day idea of human dignity, which only emerged in the 18th century. (This last fact was not entirely new to me, since we already encountered it in the ITRL series before, in the volume containing Mannetti's On Human Worth and Excellence; see my post about it. As it turns out, that volume was also translated by Brian Copenhaver, just like the present one.)

And apparently the idea that Pico's Oration has anything to do with human dignity (in our modern sense) only goes back to the 19th century: “Burckhardt linked the prince with dignity again in unforgettable prose, eventually inspiring philosophers — Ernst Cassirer, Eugenio Garin, Giovanni Gentile, and Paul Kristeller — to embroider the connection. [. . .] our Pico was created by Cassirer, Garin, Gentile, and Kristeller, and Gianfrancesco's Pico was not that personage. His Life of his uncle barely mentions the Oration and pays no attention at all to the idea of dignity.” (P. xviii.) “Until after World War I, few detected any praise of human dignity in them [i.e. Pico's writings]” (p. vii); but “[i]n the second half of the twentieth century, textbooks written for college students in North America enlarged his fame and amplified it into stardom” (p. vii) — he was made into something of a saint of secular humanism.

So if Pico's Oration was not really about human dignity, what *was* it about? That's what much of the rest of the introduction tries to answer, which, again, was interesting but often a bit too technical for me to follow. Giovanni Pico immersed himself in all sorts of esoteric philosophical and religious traditions, especially the Kabbalah, and tried to use them to demonstrate that various philosophical schools are actually in agreement with each other, that Christianity rather than Judaism is the true religion, and so on. To say that this programme was incredibly ambitious is an understatement ((“I have chosen to put forward a new philosophy”, p. 123); in any case, he drew up a list of 900 theses about it and wrote the Oration as an introduction.

Copenhaver's introduction goes into a good deal of detail about the structure of the Oration (see the useful table on p. xlv), but it loses me completely when it discusses the Kabbalah and what Pico was trying to do with it. It is enormously impressive that some people manage to make any sense of these topics, and it's clear that Copenhaver has read no less wide and deep in these matters than Pico himself. The bibliography at the end of the book reminds you a little of the sort of things you find in Lovecraft's stories — “Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were represented in profusion”, etc. — and if you found the Necronomicon listed somewhere amongst them, it wouldn't feel out of place at all :) I'm not really the right target audience for this stuff, but I hope that whoever exactly is the target audience will find this book and duly appreciate the tremendous effort that the translator has clearly put into it.

Gianfrancesco's Life of Giovanni Pico

Gianfrancesco's biography made for an interesting read, especially since pretty much everything in it was new to me. One downside of it is that it is almost more of a hagiography than a biography, and that's by design; Gianfrancesco says quite openly that he followed such examples as lives of saints, or Porphyry's life of Plotinus (p. 3). As a result, what would have been a remarkable life of a man of impressive and precocious accomplishments even if presented soberly, now glows with a splendour that feels somewhat superhuman and unreal.

But even taking the biographer's biases into account, you can't help but be impressed by Giovanni Pico, who dug deep in all the most abstruse schools of ancient and medieval philosophy and amassed an incredible amount of learning. Regular old Christian theology and Neoplatonism might have been enough for a less fearsomely learned man, but for Pico that was just the beginning; Orphic Hymns and Chaldean Oracles, Arabic Peripatetics and Jewish Cabalists, no form of mysticism was too much for him; the crazier the mumbo jumbo, the better he liked it.

What I found the most amazing was how young he was when he accomplished all this. I always imagine a philosopher, especially a Neoplatonic one, as an old man with a flowing white beard; but Pico was only twenty-three years old when he wrote his best-known works. He published a list of what is usually called the 900 Theses (though the translator of the present volume always calls them Conclusions, which seems to be closer to their Latin title), and offered to defend them in a public disputation in Rome (he even offered to pay the travel expenses of any scholar who might wish to come from other parts of Italy to challenge him in the debate).

His theses touched on nearly every school of philosophy, on the work of every significant medieval theologian, and on seemingly every variety of esotericism and mysticism that he could lay his hands on. He proposed to demonstrate that Plato's and Aristotle's philosophies don't really disagree in any significant way, and that those who think they do disagree have simply misunderstood them (p. 153); that the principles of the (Jewish) Kabbalah prove the truth of Christian (and in fact specifically Catholic) beliefs about the Trinity (pp. 135, 162); he had things to say about the technicalities of the Eucharist (p. 144) that I am in no way equipped to understand, but I've read enough to not be in the least surprised that he got into trouble for them :)

He wrote his Oration as a sort of introduction to the 900 theses; it is addressed to the pope and cardinals, and tries to explain why he's doing this and why his proposed debate is a good idea. However, some of his theses or conclusions proved too controversial; he wrote an Apology to clarify his views, but even so, the debate never took place (p. 19). Over the next few years he wrote various short works on theology and philosophy, and started working on an ambitious “book in seven parts [. . .] against enemies of the Church” (p. 37), of which he however only finished one part, against astrologers. He died suddenly of a fever, aged only 31 (p. 61), and much of his work was only published posthumously, edited by his nephew and biographer.

All this, in sort, made for an impressive story and a good read, even though it also had the unfortunate effect of making me feel even more like a worthless, underachieving loser than I usually do. He had learnt, and thought, and achieved infinitely more by twenty-three than I ever will, no matter how long I live.

Giovanni Pico's Oration

And yet, all that being said, the actual contents of Pico's work were completely and utterly incomprehensible to me; they might just as well have been written in Chinese for all the sense that I could make of them. This applies especially to his theses, a selection of which is included in the present volume as an appendix (but the translator promises to bring out the whole thing in a future* volume of the ITRL series, p. 199).

[*Incidentally, he has been at work on these things for an impressively long time. In the early days of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, its website had a list of ‘Forthcoming Volumes’, and as early as November 2001 that list included a Philosophical Writings by Giovanni Pico, edited by Brian P. Copenhaver. By February 2004 that title changed to Oration, 900 Theses (hah! so he didn't call them “conclusions” yet :)), and by July 2005 it was joined by three other volumes: Apology; The Witch. On Imagination; and Letters; the last two of these to be edited by people other than Copenhaver. None of these volumes have actually appeared in the ITRL series so far. I'm guessing there's a moderately good chance we'll get the 900 Theses in a few years, but the others have probably been abandoned.]

But the Oration, too, has long sections that were quite baffling to me. Still, that doesn't mean that it was a bad read. Pico writes in a lively, enthusiastic style, and you can't help feeling that he genuinely believed that he was on the way to something big; that with efforts like his, man can resolve the disputes between the various philosophical schools, penetrate into the deepest theological mysteries, and pretty much become one with god. How could I not admire such boldness, such ambition, even if the details are incomprehensible to me; how could I not envy his zeal and his overflowing energy! Sure, you might say that his ambitions were absurdly large; that it is all just youthful headstrongness and impetuousity — recklessness and brashness even; maybe, and yet even so — how fine and grand all that seems in comparison to my sober middle-aged awareness that I'm never going to accomplish anything worthwhile...

One thing that bothered me a little about Pico's Oration is that his writing style seems calculated more to show off his learning than to be clear and accessible to the reader. He has a habit of using a word or phrase from the work of some earlier author as a way of alluding to it, without saying explicitly that this is what he is doing or which author or book he has in mind. In principle this can be very pleasant if the writer and the reader have a sufficient amount of shared background knowledge; much like nowadays one could use the phrase ‘to be or not to be’ in a piece of writing and expect the reader to know where it is from. But Pico's allusions are much too obscure for that; not only to classical Greek and Roman authors and to biblical passages, but often enough to still more recondite sources such as the cabbalistic books he had studied with such avidity. The translator tries to help us by explaining the technique in his introduction (pp. lxii–lxiv) and by putting such words or phrases in italics and including the list of sources for each paragraph in the notes at the end of the book; this is impressive and must have taken an enormous amount of effort, but even so, someone like me can't really get anything out of Pico's allusions since I mostly didn't know anything much about the works where he got them or the context in which they originally appeared. I may at least take consolation in the fact that apparently many of Pico's allusions would have gone over the heads of even his original audience of Roman cardinals, or indeed of anyone short of a full-blown cabalist (pp. xlii, lxiv). Pico simply “disliked clarity” and “kept his oratory unclear” (translator's note 4, p. 254); see also p. 131 on his belief in the importance of using obscurity to keep the most important knowledge secret from the masses.

Another bizarre example of how Pico parades his learning is the inclusion of a few words and phrases in Hebrew and even in what he considered to be “Chaldean”, which apparently turns out to be Aramaic or Syriac but written in the Ethiopic script... Unsurprisingly, early printed editions of Pico's works simply have blank spaces there, since the printers didn't have types for those scripts. In the present volume those gaps were filled based on a partial manuscript of Pico's Oration (pp. xxxiv–v). Frankly, it's an asshole move on Pico's part. He knew perfectly well that nobody could read those scripts, even if they could have been printed; and there was nothing about those few Hebrew or Chaldean words that he could not have explained in Latin, if he had had the slightest interest in being understood instead of just showing off. Nowadays we have thesis advisors and peer reviewers to keep such things in check, but alas, Pico was self-published :))

In the early part of his Oration, Pico has some beautiful and inspiring passages about man's place in the order of things: “when his work was done, the Artificer wanted someone to assess the reason for so great an undertaking, to love its beauty, to be astonished by its immensity” (p. 83),* and therefore created man and told him: “No fixed seat, no special look, nor any particular gift of your own have we given you, Adam, so that what seat, what look, what gifts you choose for yourself, these you may have and hold as you wish, according to your purpose.” (Ibid.) “This is man's supreme and astonishing good fortune, to whom it is given to have what he chooses, to be what he wants. [. . .] If the seeds he tends are vegetal, the man will be a plant. If they are sensual, he will grow into a beast. If they are rational, he will turn into a heavenly animal. If they are intellectual, he will be an angel and a son of God. And if he is not contented with the lot of creatures and draws himself into the center of his own unity, becoming a spirit and one with God, this one who has been set above everything will stand ahead of them all and absolutely apart in the Father's darkness.” (P. 85.) And on p. 89 Pico has more to say on how man can rival angels: “let us be their rivals for rank and glory. Once we will it, in nothing shall we be their inferiors.” With passages like these, it's not too hard to see how the idea that this was an oration about human dignity was able to take hold.** They are not too unlike the sort of things we saw in Mannetti's On Human Worth and Excellence. But admittedly all this is only in the first few pages of Pico's oration; later he moves on to other topics.

[* “Man was created to admire the Creator in the creation, according to Lactantius” (translator's note 4 on p. 253). So now we know where that line on Jägermeister labels comes from.]

[**But maybe I am misinterpreting everything. The translator says, in his introduction, that by wanting people to merge into god, Pico would “eliminate anything distinctly individual and human. [. . .] Seeing no absolute value in human individuals, why would Pico worry about their dignity — as we worry now? Our dignity was never his concern.” (P. xlix.)]

The translator's notes to the Oration are about as extensive as the Oration itself; far be it for me to complain about overabundant notes (better overabundant than not abundant enough), but this did pose something of a problem while reading. I spent so much time reading the notes that I kept losing track of what was going on in the Oration, and in the end I found that I didn't really understand much more after reading the notes than before. This is not, of course, a complaint against the notes; to make a work like this intelligible to a reader like me would require far more explanations that can be reasonably expected to fit in the notes. But I would probably have done better if I had just read the whole Oration first, leaving the notes until the end.

Miscellenaous

I vaguely remember hearing Giovanni Pico described as ‘the Count of Concordia’, and wondering if this was some sort of nickname alluding to his efforts to prove that different philosophical schools don't actually disagree; but it turns out that there really is a territory of that name. :))

From Gianfrancesco's biography: “I remember his telling me one day that he had spent seven thousand gold coins up to that point to acquire books on all kinds of topics” (p. 47); and in the Oration, Giovanni Pico himself also brags about his collection of cabbalistic books: “I had bought them for myself at no small cost and had read through them with the greatest attention and unremitting labor” (p. 135). This is impressive, and I can of course sympathize with someone who spends too much money on books :), and yet you also can't help wishing that all that mental effort and ability had been spent on something more worthwhile than on a hopeless tangle of esoteric puzzles and overcooked fairy-tales...

After citing a book about human dignity published at “Milan: Silvio Berlusconi, 1994”, the translator adds: “published over Berlusconi's imprint, a misnamed speech about dignity is astonishing — but not in the way that the prince intended” :))

Giovanni Pico's mother, Giulia née Boiardo, was the aunt of Matteo Boiardo (p. 230), who I presume is the famous epic poet.

Gianfrancesco says that the origins of the Pico family “are said [to] go back to the Emperor Constantine through a great-grandson, Picus, from whom the whole family is said to have taken its name” (pp. 9–11). This story would be very charming if it were true, but according to the translator's note, it is from a 14th-century chronicle (p. 229, n. 4).

Giovanni Pico wrote several books of love poems both in Latin and in Italian, but eventually threw them “in the fire for religion's sake” (p. 23).

Interesting: Gianfrancesco's Life of Giovanni Pico was also translated into English by Thomas More (The Life of John Picus, Erle of Myrandula); p. xvii.

Apparently Giovanni Pico, late in life, was in contact with Girolamo Savonarola, the mad preacher who had such an influence in Florence at the time. Savonarola insisted that “I knew that God had called him to religion by speaking inside him” (p. 67), but as Pico never followed up on this by becoming a priest or monk, Savonarola declared in a sermon after Pico's death that Pico would burn in purgatory for this disobedience, though fortunately not for an unlimited time* (p. 69); “a man who was present for the sermon came up to the speaker and told him that the dead man had appeared to him walled in by fire and confessing that he was still paying the price of his ingratitude” (p. 71). :))) To Gianfrancesco's discredit, he took Savonarola and his nonsense quite seriously, but then he was far from the only one to do so at the time.

[*On a semi-related note, one the more controversial among Pico's 900 theses was that “for a mortal sin in limited time the penalty due is not unlimited in time but only limited” (p. 156). Admittedly I'm not sure how any mortal sin could be anything other than limited in time, since the sinner's life is limited...]

Giovanni Pico's claims to espouse an idealistic view of debates: “even the most helpless person should not shirk such a fight [. . .] since what the loser gets from the winner is help, not harm, and after his loss he goes home the richer — knowing more — and is better equipped to fight in the future” (Oration, p. 115). But I suspect that in practice debates rarely work that way.

Giovanni Pico on the Kabbalah: “So scrupulously are these books revered by Jews of our time that they permit no one under the age of forty to touch them” (p. 135).

Giovanni Pico on the Orphic Hymns: “Orpheus, however, wrapped his mysterious doctrines in folds of myth [. . .] concealing them so well under a veil of poetry that anyone who reads his Hymns would think there was nothing beneath them but fables and the purest nonsense.” (P. 137.) I *love* this sentence because, although Pico meant it in earnest, it would work equally well, with exactly the opposite sense, if it came from Voltaire or Gibbon or some other such deeply sarcastic enlightenment-era writer :)))

ToRead:

Brian Copenhaver, the translator of the present volume, published several other very interesting-sounding books about Pico and related subjects:

• The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (2015). An “anthology of the western magical tradition”, with his commentary.
• Magic in Western Culture from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (2015). “This groundbreaking book treats magic as a classical tradition with foundations that were distinctly philosophical”; Ficino and other Neoplatonists feature prominently in it, but not Pico, whom the author deliberately kept aside for his next book (see below).
• Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory (2019). This seems to be a whole book about how Pico came to be seen as a champion of human dignity — the present volume touches on this in the introduction, but a whole book about this should be fascinating.

Another interesting-sounding book is mentioned on p. 305: Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (1997).