THOMAS MORE et al.
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his biographer describes him, and with that sanguine, clear skin,
decenti rubore
interspersa
, as with the light of morning upon it; and he has a true place in that group
of great Italians who fill the end of the fifteenth century with their names, he is a true
HUMANIST. For the essence of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to
have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can
wholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside which they
have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human
minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate, or expended time and
zeal.
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
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Title Page of 1890 Edition
GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA:
HIS LIFE BY HIS NEPHEW GIOVANNI FRANCESCO PICO:
ALSO THREE OF HIS LETTERS; HIS INTERPRETATION OF PSALM XVI.; HIS
TWELVE RULES OF A CHRISTIAN LIFE; HIS TWELVE POINTS OF A
PERFECT LOVER; AND HIS DEPRECATORY HYMN TO GOD.
TRANSLATED FROM THE LATIN
BY
SIR THOMAS MORE.
EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY
J. M. RIGG, ESQ.,
OF LINCOLN S INN, BARRISTER-AT-LAW.
LONDON:
PUBLISHED BY DAVID NUTT IN THE STRAND.
MDCCCXC.
THOMAS MORE et al.
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INTRODUCTION.
By
J. M. Rigg
IOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, "the Phoenix of the
wits," is one of those writers whose personality will always count
for a great deal more than their works. His extreme, almost
feminine beauty, high rank, and chivalrous character, his immense
energy and versatility, his insatiable thirst for knowledge, his
passion for theorizing, his rare combination of intellectual
hardihood with genuine devoutness of spirit, his extraordinary precocity, and his
premature death, make up a personality so engaging that his name at any rate, and the
record of his brief life, must always excite the interest and enlist the sympathy of
mankind, though none but those, few in any generation, who love to loiter curiously in
the bypaths of literature and philosophy, will ever care to follow his eager spirit
through the labyrinths of recondite speculation which it once thrilled with such high
and generous hope. For us, indeed, of the latter end of the nineteenth century, trained
in the exact methods, guided by the steady light of modern philosophy and criticism,
it is no easy matter to enter sympathetically into the thoughts of men who lived while
as yet these were not, men who spent their strength in errant efforts, in blind gropings
in the dark, on abortive half-solutions or no-solutions of problems too difficult for
them, mere ignes fatui, it would seem, or at best mere brilliant meteor stars
illuminating the intellectual firmament with a transitory trail of light, and then
vanishing to leave the darkness more visible, yet without whose mistakes and failures
and apparently futile waste of power philosophy and criticism would not have come
into being.
Among such wandering meteoric apparitions not the least brilliant was Pico
della Mirandola. Born in 1463, he grew to manhood in time to witness and participate
in the effectual revival of Greek learning in Italy; yet his earliest bias was scholastic,
and a schoolman in grain he remained to the day of his death. How strongly he had
felt the influence of the schoolmen, how little disposed he was to follow the
humanistic hue and cry of indiscriminate condemnation, may be judged from the
eloquent apology for them which, in the shape of a letter to his friend Ermolao
Barbaro, he published in 1485. It was the fashion to stigmatize the schoolmen as
barbarians because they knew no Greek and could not write classical Latin. That was
the head and front of their offending in the eyes of men who had no idea of a better
method of philosophizing than theirs, nor indeed any interest in philosophy, mere
rhetoricians, grammarians, and pedagogues, while at any rate the schoolmen, however
rude their style, were serious thinkers, who in grappling with the deepest problems of
science human and divine displayed the rarest patience, sagacity, subtlety and
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
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ingenuity. Such is the gist of Pico's plea on behalf of the "barbarians," in urging which
he exhausts the resources of rhetoric, and the ingenuity of the advocate; nor is there
reason to doubt that it represents at least the embers of a very genuine enthusiasm.
That challenge, also, which he issued at Rome, and in every university in Italy in the
winter of 1486-7, summoning as if by clarion call every intellectual knight-errant in
the peninsula to try conclusions with him in public disputation in the eternal city after
the feast of Epiphany, does it not recall the celebrated exploit of Duns Scotus at Paris,
when, according to the tradition, he won the title of Doctor Subtilis by refuting two
hundred objections to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary
in a single day? Only, as befitted "a great lord of Italy," Pico's tournament is to be on
a grander scale. Duns had but one thesis to defend; Pico offers to maintain nine
hundred, and lest poverty should reduce the number of his antagonists he offers to pay
their travelling expenses. Moreover, to Duns, Aquinas, and other of the schoolmen,
Pico is beholden for not a few of his theses; of the rest, some are drawn direct from
Plato, others from Neo-Pythagorean, Neo-Platonic and syncretist writers, while a
certain number appear to be original. Pico, however, was not so fortunate as Duns: the
church smelt heresy in his propositions, and Pope Innocent VIII., though he had at
first authorised, was induced to prohibit their discussion. (Bull dated 4th August,
1487). Thirteen were selected for examination by a special commission and were
pronounced heretical. Pico, however, so far from bowing to its decision, wrote in hot
haste an elaborate "Apologia" or defence of his orthodoxy, which, had it not been
more ingenious than conclusive, might perhaps have been accepted; as it was, it only
brought him into further trouble.
This Apology "elucubrated," as he tells, "properante stilo" in twenty nights,
Pico dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici, modestly describing it as "exiguum sane munus,
sed fidei meæ, sed observantiæ profecto in omne tempus erga te maxime non leve
testimonium," "a trifling gift indeed, but as far as possible from being a slight token of
my loyalty, nay, of my devotion to you." Hasty though its composition was, it
certainly displays no lack of either ingenuity, subtlety, acuteness, learning, or style.
Evidently written out of a full mind, it represents Pico's mature judgment upon the
abstruse topics which it handles, and is a veritable masterpiece of scholastic
argumentation. After a brief prologue detailing the circumstances which gave
occasion to the work Pico proceeds to discuss seriatim the thirteen "damnatæ
conclusiones," and the several objections which had been made to them. The tone
throughout is severe and dry and singularly free from heat or asperity. Some of the
theses are treated at considerable length, others dismissed in a page or two, or even
less. Altogether, when the rapidity of its composition is borne in mind, the treatise
appears little less a prodigy.
The obnoxious theses were as follows:-- (1) That Christ did not truly and in
real presence, but only
quoad effectum, descend into hell; (2) that a mortal sin of finite
duration is not deserving of eternal but only of temporal punishment; (3) that neither
the cross of Christ, nor any image, ought to be adored in the way of worship; (4) that
God cannot assume a nature of any kind whatsoever, but only a rational nature; (5)
that no science affords a better assurance of the divinity of Christ than magical and
cabalistic science; (6) that assuming the truth of the ordinary doctrine that God can
take upon himself the nature of any creature whatsoever, it is possible for the body of
Christ to be present on the altar without the conversion of the substance of the bread
or the annihilation of "paneity;" (7) that it is more rational to believe that Origen is
saved than that he is damned; (8) that as no one's opinions are just such as he wills