This is an old problem and spills from the very source of Western philosophy in Greece in the seventh century BC. Simply put, the problem of the one and the many is this: if the universe can be understood as a single thing, let's say God, how do all the manifold parts of the universe relate to this single thing? The standard Christian position was that the many of the universe were created out of nothing by God; this is called "creation ex nihilo.
Since it is arbitrarily created, it can be arbitrarily interfered with. The Neoplatonists, on the other hand, believed that the many things of the universe were "emanaations" from God. As a result, rather than the universe being an arbitrary act of God, the creation of the universe is necessarily part of the nature of God. There is an underlying logic to the created universe that is always infallibly true. Finally, in Averroism, which was the version of Aristoteleanism that the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance inherited, the question of creation is simply laid aside as irrelevant to physical inquiry.
Averroism tries to explain physical events by looking at their immediate and determinate causes. This is what Pico faced in trying to understand the universe; these three completely opposed ways of understanding the universe in relation to God were unreconcilable.
Pico's basic approach to the problem of the one and the many was to argue that the many things of the universe, rather than being created by God or emanating from God or being unrelated to God, argued that they are all symbols of God. Everything in creation, every object, every human, every thought, every speech, every religion, every philosophy, is an image of God and an expression of God as the One.
What unites all of creation is this symbolic relation to God. The Neoplatonists starting with Nicholas Cusanus also adopted this view; Cusanus said that human beings could only understand God negative through "conjectures in otherness" in alteritate conjecturali in Latin. Pico reverses this situation; not only is the world similar to God, but everything that human beings can think, imagine, and create are expressions of divinity.
I cannot tell you in words strong enough in their emphasis how important this concept was for the development of art and literature in the High Renaissance; the later artists of the Renaissance, including Michelangelo, were convinced that through the operation of their own intellect and creativity that they were giving expression to the divine or at least expressing its likeness.
In this view, the individual human being with her thoughts, intelligence, and imagination becomes a "small universe," or parvus mundus. The individual human being is the microcosm , that is, the individual human being can express the whole of creation and can express the whole of the divine.
Other words of great power are the names of the Sefirot , which are unknown, as such, to the Bible; they are names not of God but of aspects or manifestations or emanations of divinity. Since God in his highest essence remains hidden, finite beings can know the Infinite only in so far as it descends from its secret heights. The last moments of that descent make up the world of common human awareness. The first moments, far beyond the reach of ordinary perception, are the ten Sefirot.
Pico was the first Christian to treat knowledge of Kabbalah as valuable. Flavius Mithridates, his most prolific Jewish informant, translated and mistranslated thousands of pages of Kabbalah into Latin for him.
Large portions of the Oration , drawing on these texts, are also informed by Kabbalah in ways that no contemporary Christian could have detected—least of all a Christian who lacked the clues provided by the Conclusions.
In the 72 Kabbalist theses at the end of the Conclusions , this revelation becomes Christology and Trinitarian theology. From a Kabbalist point of view, the Sefirot and the divine names are actors in dramas of theology, cosmology, anthropology and angelology whose major themes are exile, death, atonement and redemption, stories that Pico transposes onto the Christian Trinity, with Jesus Christ, the Messiah, as the saving hero.
Accordingly, leading points of spiritual practice in the Conclusions are prayer, prophecy and ascent to mystical union with God , which is also the main topic of the Oration , where Pico makes positive use of magic and theurgy as steps toward the ascent.
The Conclusions , which confirm this endorsement of magic, also show in greater detail than the Oration why Pico links magic with Kabbalah. He sees it as a spiritual technique which, like the higher theurgy of the Neoplatonic philosophers, locates and opens routes to God which ordinarily are unknown to humans.
The practice of Kabbalah starts with theory because these hidden channels of divinity must be disclosed and interpreted before they can be used: spirituality follows hermeneutics. Language is the gateway to wisdom, the elements of language are letters and numbers, and these signs proliferate in secret codes. The larger Kabbalist project of the Conclusions , and hence of the Kabbalah in the Oration , is Christological and Trinitarian. The smaller exhibitions of Kabbalah that Pico uses to support his grand theory focus on particular Biblical texts, which are also illuminated by the Gentile wisdom of the ancient theologians.
Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pythagoras and other ancient theologians are among the authorities from whom Pico derives his theses, but so are Aquinas, Albertus and other scholastics, Averroes, Avicenna and other Muslims as well as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus and the Greek commentators.
That Salviati thought the Commento , Conclusions and Apology negligible or embarrassing is more likely than that he did not know those works. For readers whom Kabbalah might alienate, the Heptaplus was not much of a threat because Pico had sanitized it. For the best account of the Heptaplus , see the book by Crofton Black Although Genesis was not as attractive to Christian interpreters as Job or the Psalms, explicating the creation narrative of Gen.
Only from a Christian perspective was there anything exotic in it, and its main effect on Christians would have been to dazzle them with art. This seemingly extraneous ending is actually a grand and arcane finale. Although Pico does not explain the Gates in the Conclusions , he does mention them in a way that gave later scholars, like Johann Reuchlin, the clues that they needed to find such enigmas in Kabbalist texts and then decipher them.
The short version of the story is that Wisdom, the second Sefirah S2 ; see Fig. The 50 Gates, also called the Jubilee, correspond to the year festival ordained in Leviticus but also to a millenarian Great Jubilee of 50, years, when the 7 sabbatical cycles or weeks of 7, years come to an end. After the lower Sefirot collapse into S3 in a final millennium, the cycle starts again, having been completed in that last generation of a thousand years—in the Sabbath of the Shekinah S But who knew or could have known?
In , when the Heptaplus was published, its only informed readership was the handful of learned Jews in Italy who could also read Latin—the very people who had taught Pico himself enough Kabbalah to fill his Conclusions with it. In the Heptaplus , however, even where its structure and content obviously depend on Kabbalah, Pico suppresses what the Jews had taught him, until the final exposition of Bereshit that could only have baffled Christian readers if it did not offend them.
As in his earlier works, Pico intends to mystify because he believes that the highest and most sacred wisdom must not be divulged in plain language. The surprising thing, in the Western tradition of philosophy, is that Pico thinks of this project as philosophical. But by the end of the eighteenth century, Kant had so thoroughly revolutionized philosophy that its history had to be reformulated in Kantian terms.
In practice, the task was to update the huge Critical History of Philosophy produced by Jacob Brucker in , where the eclectic Brucker describes Pico as that worst of all monsters, a Platonizing, Judaizing syncretist. Half a century later, Wilhelm Tennemann began the revisionist History of Philosophy — in which Pico makes his first appearance as a proto-Kantian advocate of human freedom and dignity.
In the first few pages of the Oration —pages read more often than any other product of Renaissance Latin humanism—God tells Adam that he, alone of all creatures, can make himself what he wants to be. Having gathered strength during the nineteenth century, and having acquired a romantic patina, this view of Pico—and, by implication, of Renaissance humanism—reached its peak with the great Neo-Kantian of his age, Ernst Cassirer.
Meanwhile, Eugenio Garin had published what is still the most important book on Pico in the Fascist Italy of , just before the racial laws were put into force. The most conspicuous pages of the Oration , celebrated by Garin and many others as the humanist charter of human freedom and dignity, are just the first few. Assured by them that we can be what we want to be, we are then told—contrary to the usual interpretation of the Oration —that what we must be is not human at all.
Giovanni Pico was born on 24 February A precocious vocation for studies encouraged him in to attend Bologna University where he studied canonical law. Pico was not particularly interested in these teachings. After the death of his mother, he moved first to Ferrara and then to Padua, an important centre for philosophical studies. In the first months of he settled in Florence, a rich and animated cultural environment. Between July and March , the Philosopher lived in Paris.
Pico's writings soon aroused criticism, unfavourable reactions and accusations. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy Edition. Editors: Henrik Lagerlund. Contents Search. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Authors Authors and affiliations M.
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