Eco’s Crackpot
As is commonplace if not obligatory among PhD students, as I worked on my thesis, I found myself disagreeing with a lot of standard narratives about Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. One scholar whose work I always appreciated as a counterweight to these standard narratives is Brian Copenhaver. A few years ago he sent me a copy of his intriguing revisionist historiography of Pico Studies, entitled Magic and the Dignity of Man (Belknap Press, 2019), and it struck chords in me so I started to write a review/essay which I imagined I might submit to the LRB or something like that. Regrettably I never finished writing it. So it ends in medias res which I guess isn’t unfitting for Pico himself.
Some years ago I sat next to Umberto Eco at a dinner in Oxford. He regaled us with a constant flow of obscure facts and entertaining observations and it was by no means easy to gain a conversational foothold. I was determined to do so, however, and eventually when he offered a brief pause I plunged into the gap vigorously, announcing that I had seen him lecture in the early 90s, when I was still at school, on which occasion I had for the first time heard the name Pico della Mirandola. Now, I was pleased to tell him, I was writing my doctorate on Pico and his allegorical readings of the book of Genesis.
I thought by this gambit that we might be diverted to the topic of esoteric interpretation, allegory, kabbalah and so on, which I was keen to discuss with the maestro, especially since his books, among others, had initiated me into this field of study. But it was not to be. Eco, only momentarily thrown off his stride, said firmly: "I have always felt that Pico was a crackpot – unlike Ficino, who was much more grounded." And he turned to other matters.
The remark stayed with me, partly because it was so contrary to my own opinion: Pico, to my mind, was an innovative thinker who wrote some admirably brief books which were more than the sum of their parts, while his colleague and compatriot Marsilio Ficino I felt (no doubt unfairly) to be very much his opposite, a wordy compiler whose expansive volumes somehow managed to amount to less than he had put in them.
It also seemed somewhat contrary to the scholarly consensus surrounding Pico, who, while more celebrated than read, nonetheless stood out as an intellectual heavyweight of his time – not that this meant that his work was widely appreciated outside the relatively small commune of scholars who studied philosophy (if such there was, detractors interject) between Aquinas and Descartes.
In fact, as Brian Copenhaver's new book shows, it was by no means unusual to see Giovanni Pico, count of Mirandola, as a crackpot; this was his fortuna for a considerable portion of the half millennium that has elapsed since his death. (It is distinctly odd to invoke as a well-balanced anti-Pico the author of Three Books on Life, a compendium of the occupational hazards of being an intellectual, replete with discussions of cosmic rays, statue animation, love mantras and healing incantations. But that is another story.)
Like many, I imagine, I was drawn to the study of Pico by Frances Yates's The Art of Memory, Edgar Wind's Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance and in particular Ernst Cassirer's The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. This last argued that Pico, whose brief life ended in 1494, was a herald of a new mode of thought: "a transformation ... in the whole intellectual attitude."
Cassirer demarcated as the locus classicus of this transformation a short text by Pico known as "Oration on the dignity of man", a work which, he said, "contains a specifically modern pathos of thought". "Burkhardt called Pico's oration one of the most noble bequests of the culture of the Renaissance," Cassirer reminded his readers. "And indeed, it summarizes with grand simplicity and in pregnant form the whole intent of the Renaissance and its entire concept of knowledge." Building on this insight, the internet now proffers the trope that the Oration is the "manifesto" of the Italian Renaissance.
The Oration was intended as a prolusion to a grand contest, to be held in Rome in 1487, in the course of which the twenty-four year old Pico would debate 900 philosophical theses or "conclusions" in the face of all comers. The debate, however, was suppressed, and Pico himself imprisoned. But despite this awkward no-show his project metamorphosed, via a number of influential accounts, into the signature effort of the age - and the theme of the "dignity of man" metamorphosed into the central theme of his work.
It has long been recognised that there are a few inconvenient facts clouding the portrayal of Pico's Oration as the philosophical fulcrum of the Renaissance and the literary threshold of modernity. One of these is that the Oration never happened, although large chunks of it turned up shortly after its intended delivery date in Pico's hastily written complaint about the fact that he had not been allowed to deliver it. Another is that its title, when it did appear in print, shortly after his death, was simply "Oration", not "Oration on the dignity of man". In recent years these facts have rarely been allowed to destabilise the central position in Pico's work which Cassirer and his followers allotted the Oration.
Now, however, comes Brian Copenhaver with an impressively martialled demolition crew. The Oration is not about the dignity of man, nor, for the first four hundred years of its life, was it seen as being about this. How it came to be attached to this topos is an intriguing tale, encompassing as it does tetchy philosophes, propagandist clergy, local government boosters and scholarly oneupmanship in fascist Italy, with walk-on parts for Jean-Paul Sartre, the United Nations and Silvio Berlusconi.
For many historians from the sixteenth century onwards, Pico was a Schwärmer, an "Enthusiast" in English, meaning something less complimentary than it usually does now; a crackpot, if you will. His reputation ebbed and flowed with the tides of Reformation and Enlightenment intellectual history. When he was praised, it was because of his attack on astrology, his bibliophilia, his ascetic lifestyle, his quest for philosophical concord or his study of Jewish mysticism; when he was criticised, it was for his study of Jewish mysticism, his quest for philosophical concord (participating in a "plague" of syncretists, according to Jakob Brucker), his engagement with magic, Platonism, scholasticism, and his bibliomania.
Particularly stern in his critique was Voltaire, who, in the second half of the eighteenth century, portrayed Pico as symptomatic of the approach to knowledge which typified his era – and a particularly bad case of it. He cursorily dismissed the eclectic compilation of the Conclusions as "just the spirit of the age ... stuff that was learnt in any university" and noted acidly that "thousands of students filled their heads with these chimeras, hanging around the schools where they were taught until they were 40 years old." Pico was "most unfortunate to have consumed his days in such serious dementia," but on the other hand, "very few, after the time of Dante and Petrarch, escaped the shadows of this erudition" which consisted in "knowing by heart, on each subject matter, a few words of no use". Those contemporary scholars who attacked Pico for his opinions (such as the cleric Pedro Garcia) were no better, however: "these censures are like the decisions of Indians who condemn the opinion that the earth is held up by a dragon, because, they say, it could only be held up by an elephant."
Kant, at the end of the eighteenth century, had a similarly low opinion of the prince's achievements. Pico was a "prodigy of memory", one of those "polyhistorians who carry around in their heads ... a load of books sufficient for one hundred camels." We should not speak disdainfully of them, Kant added disdainfully, because "they perhaps did not possess the power of judgment suitable for choosing among all this knowledge in order to make appropriate use of it."
A couple of decades later, Hegel, in his lectures on the history of philosophy, described the later middle ages as a time of philosophical dryness and dullness, of "speculations which went wandering off into endless details." The turn towards Neoplatonism, exemplified by Ficino and Pico, had produced "a mass of literature ... but it is a literature of the past," a mummified relic which "cannot last among the living". Beside these redundant bookworms were others whose burning desire for knowledge was "spoilt by endless fancies, extravagances of the imagination and a craze for secret, astrological, geomantic and other knowledge", remarkable individuals who "really resemble the upheavals, tremblings and eruptions of a volcano which has become worked up in its depths and has brought forth new developments, which as yet are wild and uncontrolled." Among these, Hegel determined, were Cardanus, Bruno, Vanini, Campanella, and Ramus; not Pico.
The standard accounts of philosophy of the twentieth century tend to echo this disregard. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy did not mention Pico. Frederick Copleston gave him a couple of pages in his chapter on "the revival of Platonism", while Lynn Thorndike, although offering a fuller treatment of his subject, began it with the disclaimer that "one cannot but feel that [his] importance in the history of thought has often been grossly exaggerated ... The darling of enthusiasts for the so-called Italian Renaissance, his reputation must decline with its." This overall attitude found succinct formulation in the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Pico's works cannot now be read with much interest, but the man himself is still interesting".
Pico's rise to apostle of modernity therefore took place against weighty and long entrenched opposition. It happened, as Copenhaver shows, via a convoluted series of historical quirks and personal predilections of particular scholars.
The "dignity of man" which attached itself to the title of the Oration is more of an incipit, a gloss on the opening sentence: "I have read about Abdala, a Saracen: when asked what was the most astonishing sight to be seen on this stage of the world - so to speak - he answered that there was nothing to see more astonishing than man."
The astonishing thing, Pico was to announce to his audience, was that man was a work of indeterminate form: the last created being, which had "no fixed seat, no special look, nor any particular gift" but which could follow its own desires, "with no strictures": "You may shape yourself in the form you prefer. You can sink back into lower forms that are beasts; from your own resolute spirit, you can be born again to the higher forms that are divine."
The new school of Pico criticism, which began to flourish at the end of the nineteenth century and comprised Jakob Burkhardt, Walter Pater and Eugenio Garin as well as Cassirer, turned this nugget into a manifesto. No longer a crackpot, Pico was instead a harbinger of modernity, a "paladin of free thought". His articulation of man rising to the heights of angels was an invocation of freedom that ruptured the gloomily determined medieval universe. Where the Middle Ages had despised humanity because of its distance from God, the Renaissance, under Pico's guidance, empowered humanity by making it godlike. The concomitant risk of becoming a vegetable was less frequently dwelt upon.
Mankind, in a word, was free. Cassirer observed that Pico's credo was that "people searching for their destinies should look within themselves, not at the skies". In place of Voltaire's and Kant's ridiculous bibliomane was a new, liberal Pico, who rather than losing himself in idle speculations in a library had brought about a seismic shift in world culture by prising open the Pandora's box of modernity.
Not everyone was pleased. At the height of the Cold War, in 1956, the conservative critic Russell Kirk warned that the ripples of Pico's Oration had gathered into something more mightily pernicious. Medieval man was humble, said Kirk; but in Renaissance man "the seed of hybris, overweening self-confidence, was sown," and by the twentieth century was "diffused over all the world". Those who looked back on its spread could discern "the oratorical aspirations of the humanists transformed into the technological aspirations of the modern sensual man"; they could "glimpse the beginning of the catastrophe, perhaps, in a handful of dust over Hiroshima, or in the leaden domination of the Soviets, or in the pornography and hysteria of the corner news kiosk."
Seeing Pico as the father of Playboy and the atom bomb is a niche stance. A broader and stronger case might be made that he was, rather, an ancestor of New Age: without Pico no Blavatsky, no Mathers, no Dion Fortune and less Yeats. Pico's interest in magic and kabbalah was never absent from accounts of his work, but it gained new resonance as scholars in the second half of the twentieth century began to reconsider the historical role of magical practices, analysing them as constitutive of, rather than opposed to, modernity. Leaving aside knotty scholarly controversies about the veracity of this analysis, it remains the case that there is no evidence of magical practice by Pico. Nonetheless, his status as an illustrious forebear of all manner of quite widespread modern syncretistic occult activities rests on firmer ground than his identification with the end of the medieval worldview.
The struggle to define Pico is a skirmish in a wider conflict over the ownership of the terrain of Renaissance philosophy. Is it medieval or modern? Fairly obviously, there is nothing in medieval art like the "humanness" exemplified in Michelangelo's David and Adam. Produced in the early years of the sixteenth century, they symbolise a decisive rupture from the past. Their dramatic appearance, their sheer newness and difference, beg the question of where else, outside the visual arts, this shift in the portrayal of the human occurs. Must not the age of Michelangelo – which was also the age of Columbus, the age of Guttenberg and of Lorenzo the Magnificent – witness some equally momentous peripeteia in the history of philosophy?
The categorisation of some relevant contemporary characters as "humanists" has added an element of confusion to this search. These days we typically use it to mean people who put "humans", and not God, at the centre of their world view; as such, it denotes a quintessentially "modern" take on man's status and dignitas. But it is also the word that historians use to refer to a heterogeneous bunch of bookish types in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. An understandable conflation occurs, as a result of which Renaissance intellectuals end up being seen as apologists for human autonomy. None of these people thought of themselves as humanists, however: they were librarians, secretaries, language teachers, manuscript brokers, archivists and so on – scribblers, in essence, suggests Copenhaver. Bellman, banker, baker or beaver pitching up and hunting for "modern" humanists in the Renaissance are more likely to encounter one of these.
A multitude of textbooks, seeking philosophy's Michelangelo moment of decisive difference, pass over Pico and over the whole of the following century, pausing only at the day when René Descartes announced to the reading public that "I could select from the crowd no one whose opinions seemed worthy of preference, and thus I found myself constrained to use my own reason in the conduct of my life."
As it happens, Pico, some 150 years earlier, had made the same announcement about one of his own works: a sevenfold allegorical commentary on the opening verses of Genesis, about which he said that whatever previous interpreters had composed on the subject "I shall leave completely untouched", and instead "going beyond all these, shall suggest seven other interpretations of my own discovery and development".
Descartes' profession of his own newness is widely taken at face value by philosophers; he himself was a convincing advocate of it, "thoroughly persuaded", as Copleston said, that he was making a new start. Pico's self-fashioning as an innovative explorer of the Genesis narrative has found a rather smaller audience, while the dignity of man – which by and large he never espoused – now occupies most of the column inches devoted to him.
Standard histories treat the two philosophers very differently. A century after Descartes' proclamation, however, as the French Revolution gathered pace just up the road, a schoolteacher in Mirandola, Riccardo Bartoli, took the opportunity to bring Descartes and Pico together in a book based on a rousing address he had given to local schoolboys. The point of comparison he used was not entirely flattering for either of them. "The story of Pico is very analogous to that of the great Descartes," he wrote. "Pico was proscribed, but nonetheless contributed a lot to the removal of errors in philosophy; the system devised by Descartes has been abandoned, but this does not mean he should be denied the glory of having sought philosophical truth in nature." The principal difference between them, according to Bartoli, was that Pico died young, whereas Descartes lived long enough to complete his planned works.
The analogy would have been lost on Bartoli's original audience, however; he left it out of his speech, inserting it only in the voluminous additional notes which he published later.