Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Italian philosopher

• Born: February 24, 1463
• Birthplace: Mirandola, duchy of Ferrara (now in Italy)
• Died: November 17, 1494
• Place of death: Florence (now in Italy)

Pico della Mirandola, a brilliant synthesizer of Humanist thought, articulated the concept of self-determination, which helped extend the idea of humans as individuals. His work extols the intrinsic godliness of humans and their responsibility toward society, commitment to learning, and, most important, control over their own destiny.

Early Life

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (joh-VAHN-nee PEE-koh DAYL-lah-mee-rahn-doh-lah), a precocious child endowed with a prodigious memory, was raised in an exclusive environment at a time when there was growing cultural and political turmoil in most parts of Italy. Before he was twenty years old, he was acquainted with some of the leading minds and powerful politicians that marked the era known as early Renaissance Humanism.

He was educated mostly in the great learning centers of northern Italy. He studied in Mantua, where he met Leon Battista Alberti and Angelo Poliziano, who became a lifelong friend. In 1477, he studied canon law in Bologna. Two years later, he sojourned briefly in Florence and met poet Girolamo Benivieni, and then traveled in Pavia, a haven for logicians and scientists. He then spent time in Ferrara, where he studied the litterae humaniores (liberal arts), including philosophy. He met also the visionary religious leader Girolamo Savonarola.

In 1480, he relocated to Padua for two crucial years and began the systematic study of Aristotle. A voracious reader, Pico took full advantage of the arrival in Italy of some of the great teachers and translators from Greece, Byzantium, and the Middle East, who in many cases were fleeing the spread of the Ottoman Empire into southeastern Europe. While in Padua, he encountered Elias de Medigo, who introduced him to the Hebrew and Arabic languages and cultures and who translated for Pico Arabic texts by Averröes. He also requested that Marsilio Ficino, head of the Florentine Academy, send him his book, Theologia platonica (1482; Platonic Theology, 2001-2003).

Life’s Work

In the open intellectual atmosphere of the Florentine Academy, to which Pico was by then associated, a growing passion grew into the desire to find a way to make all the different schools of thought cohere in one general understanding of the human condition. He entered into a respectful epistolary dispute with Ermolao Barbaro in Epistola ad Hermolao Barbaro (wr. 1485; “The Correspondence of G. Pico della Mirandola and Ermolao Barbaro Concerning the Relation of Philosophy and Rhetoric,” 1952), which attacked the excessive rhetoric of scholars. Excessive rhetoric, Pico argued, made philosophy, or the search for truth, not simple and direct, as it ought to be, but complex and convoluted.

Pico also spent nearly one year in Paris studying theology, but ultimately found the Parisian approach unsophisticated and “barbarous.” He returned to Florence charged with new enthusiasm and resumed the study of Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldean. Soon, he was able to read the Qur՚ān, the Kabbalah, and the Chaldean Oracles in the original and read the works of other critics and commentators who preceded him in this effort.

Pico was ready to try the supreme mediation, an approach to philosophy in which the knowledge and wisdom gathered from different and often contradictory sources can be unified in one general theory. He thus devised a way of showing to an international group of the most learned men of his day what he had in mind: He organized a public disputation (debate) on a set of nine hundred theses, to be held in Rome in early 1487.

Rich, noble, handsome, and brilliant, Pico was not solely a bookworm. Accounts by his contemporaries reveal that he did not disdain socializing; he participated in feasts and banquets as the occasion arose. In May of 1486, while in Arezzo, he attempted to kidnap Margherita, the beautiful and rich wife of Giuliano de’ Medici, a relative of Lorenzo de’ Medici. The scandal would cost him dearly, as Giuliano, the country’s aristocracy, and the Church demanded justice. His reputation was forever tarnished. Through Lorenzo’s intervention, however, Pico did not suffer dire consequences. He repented and expiated his sin by dedicating himself to a life of research and meditation.

The importance of Pico’s work and ideas cannot be overestimated. Contemporary scholars and thinkers of the rank of Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More spoke about and integrated some of Pico’s ideas into their work. In the theses and in De hominis dignitate oratio (wr. 1486-1487; Oration on the Dignity of Man , 1956), which introduced the theses and reflected his idea of combining his work with the philosophies of others, Pico intended to resolve, among other things, the dispute on the differences between Aristotle and a “Christianized” Plato through syncreticism. According to his contemporaries, he was princeps concordiae, the prince of harmony, a syncretic thinker who could find similarities between opposing tendencies.

Pico argued that if God is one and the same, then a way exists to demonstrate that Plato and Aristotle must be saying the same thing, albeit in different ways. From this came Pico’s desire to find in the different language and style of Aristotle and Plato the signs of a common aspiration. With the growing availability of other exoteric texts from Arabic and Jewish traditions, Pico opened Humanism to comparable discussions from the East, and rather than rejecting them, he was determined to find an even deeper and common wisdom to the understanding of God and to humanity’s position in the cosmos.

Pico’s theses were printed in Rome on December 7, 1486, and were supposed to circulate in the schools for a month before the beginning of his defense, slated for the day after the Feast of the Epiphany. In preparation for his defense, he wrote the short work Oration on the Dignity of Man, which was not published until after his death, however. It is part of the collection Commentationes Joannis Pici Mirandulea in 1495-1496.

The debate was interrupted by Pope Innocent VIII on suspicion that thirteen of the theses were heretical. Pico reacted to this accusation by writing his passionate Apologia , which defended his work; on August 5, all of the theses were condemned. Pico fled to France but was arrested then released through the intervention of King Charles VIII. He was invited back to the academy, under the protection of Lorenzo, who never stopped requesting a pardon from the pope. The absolution did come, finally, in June of 1493, but from another pope, Alexander VI. It arrived about one year before Pico’s death.

Oration on the Dignity of Man contains references to the Phythagoreans, the pre-Socratics, the Agnostics, the Kabbalists, Orphic and Hermetic theosophies, pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite, Zoroaster, certain aspects of astrology, and the Bible, in which Moses is considered the greatest philosopher. Pico’s attempt at synthesis could be considered superhuman in that he tried to balance the One, the supreme Being, with the human predisposition toward multiplicity, toward the endless variety present in creation. Pico developed the notion that humans, though created by God, are “work[s] of indeterminate form” who have been placed at the center of creation and can sculpt themselves “into whatever shape” they prefer (Oration on the Dignity of Man). His more mature works are scholarly attempts at working out the complexity of this assumption. These works include Heptaplus (1488; English translation, 1967), which concerned the seven days of creation, and De ente et uno (1492; Of Being and the One , 1943). He died before completing an even more thorough work titled Concordia Platonis et Aristotelis (on the agreement between Plato and Aristotle).

Significance

Pico’s work was revolutionary because it placed the responsibility for human life and actions squarely on human shoulders. He wanted to be inclusive rather than selective of the contributions from different schools of thought, and above all, he opened the discussion on free will and self-determination, which became foundational concepts for Renaissance and later thought.

Pico della Mirandola’s Major Works

1486

• Conclusiones (Syncretism in the West: Pico’s “900 Theses,” 1998

1486-1487

• De hominis dignitate oratio (pb. 1496; Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1956)

1487

• Apologia

1488

• Heptaplus (English translation, 1967)

1496

• Disputationes adversus astrologos

1492

• De ente et uno (Of Being and the One

Bibliography

Cassirer, Ernst, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Hermann Randall, Jr., eds. The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. One of the best introductions on Humanism in general, which contextualizes Pico in reference to his great contemporaries. Contains a slightly different translation of Pico’s oration.

Craven, William G. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Symbol of His Age: Modern Interpretations of a Renaissance Philosopher. Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie Droz, 1981. One of the most thorough works on the complexity of Pico’s life and writings.

Grafton, Anthony. Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Important for the role Pico played in shaping the reading of the classics and his promotion of translations from the Middle East.

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Commentary On a Canzone of Benivieni. Translated by Sears Jayne. New York: Peter Lang, 1984. Written just before the defense of his theses, Pico’s analysis reveals the depth of his Platonism.

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. On the Dignity of Man, On Being and the One, Heptaplus. Introduction by J. W. Miller. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Contains Pico’s major works, with a good introduction.

Wirszubski, Chaim. Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Very detailed and illuminating work on the key role played by Pico in the development of Kabbalah in the west.