Pico della Mirandola

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all the Oration, the Nine Hundred Theses, the Heptaplus and the Disputations against astrology.

The maker of himself, in brief

Pico's best-known teaching is that the human being has no fixed place in the order of things and becomes what he makes himself, sinking toward the beasts or rising toward the angels by his own choice, and that the way up goes through moral philosophy, the study of nature and theology. The Oration that says it, with his magus who weds earth to heaven and his search for concord among all the schools, is taught on Ficino and the Renaissance. Here are the parts of his teaching that stand on their own.

Two kinds of magic

Magic, he holds, is two things that share one name. One is wholly the work and power of demons, a thing monstrous and accursed. The other, the magic that the Persian sages meant by the word, is the highest part of natural philosophy: it searches out the powers that God has scattered and hidden in the world and brings them into the light. It works no wonder against nature; it shows how wonderful nature already is.

Two kinds of Kabbalah

Kabbalah too is double. One kind is the art of combining letters, the Hebrew letters set in order and turned, which he likens to the art of Ramon Llull; the other is the knowledge of the higher powers, the ten sefirot and the angels, and this is the highest part of natural magic. The Kabbalah, he teaches, was received by Moses on Sinai beside the written Law and handed down by word of mouth, and rightly read it confirms the Christian faith: no science, one of his theses says, gives more certainty of the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabbalah. Two streams sets this Christian Kabbalah beside the Jewish one it grew from.

Four worlds

In the Heptaplus he finds the whole of philosophy in the six days of Genesis. There are three worlds: the angelic world of the pure minds, the heavenly world of the stars, and the world below the moon, of the elements and of things that are born and die. The human being is a fourth world, a small one that holds the other three: in him are the elements, the heavens and the angelic mind. Whatever is in one world is in the others in its own way. Fire is fire among the elements, the sun in the heavens, and among the angels the burning love of the seraphim.

So Moses' account of the six days can be read seven times over: once for each of the three worlds, once for the human being, once for all the worlds in their order, once for the bonds between all things, and once for the soul's happiness in God.

The first word

At the end of the book he takes the first Hebrew word of Genesis, Bereshit, in the beginning, and by the Kabbalists' art of moving and joining its letters draws a whole sentence out of it: the Father, in the Son and through the Son, the beginning and the end, or rest, created the head, the fire and the foundation of the great man with a good covenant. One word, rightly read, holds the creed and the shape of the world.

The heavens act by light and heat

His last great work turns against the astrology of prediction. The heavens act on the world below, he grants, but only by their motion and their light, and through these by a heavenly heat that fosters life in everything. That action is general, like the sun's warmth that serves all living things alike; it is not the particular cause of anyone's character, fortune or deeds, which come from nearer causes and from the free mind. If the stars ruled everything, praise and blame would be empty and the will would not be free.

He adds the astrologers' own weaknesses. They disagree with one another about the very foundations of their art, the same figure in the sky is read to opposite ends, and their forecasts fail more often than they come true, while people remember only the hits. Such an art corrupts philosophy, unsettles medicine and endangers religion.

Being and the One

On Being and the One sets out to show that Plato and Aristotle agree, against those Platonists who put the One above being. Being and one go together and reach equally far: whatever is, is one, and whatever is one, is. God is above being only in the sense that he is its fullness, beyond every limited thing that is, and we come nearest to naming him by denying every name, until he is found in the thick darkness where, as the Scripture says, he dwells.

The book ends on what this asks of a life: to become one, true and good in ourselves, so as to come to the one who is all three.