THOMAS MORE et al.
-19-
spheres of corruptible forms and the nine planets, between seraphic intelligence and
the sun, between cherubic intelligence and the moon, seem, for what they are worth,
to be all Pico's own.
Having thus found, as he thinks, a philosophic basis for his exegetical method,
Pico proceeds to apply it to the Mosaic text with the utmost rigour and vigour. It
would be tedious to follow him through all the minutiae of his elaborate and
extraordinary interpretation. A few examples of his art will amply suffice; and we
cannot do better than begin at the beginning. What, then, did Moses mean by "In the
beginning"? The solution of this weighty problem Pico plainly regards as his greatest
triumph, and accordingly reserves it for the closing chapter, when he introduces it
with a mighty flourish of trumpets. These pregnant words, "In the beginning,"
contain, it appears, the following mystic sentence: "Pater in Filio et per Filium,
principium et finem, sive quietem, creavit caput, ignem, et fundamentum magni
hominis fœdere bono," which is elicited from them by various dexterous permutations
and combinations of the letters which make up their Hebrew equivalent. The key to
the interpretation of the sentence is found in the idea of the microcosm.
Man being the microcosm, the macrocosm, or universe, may be called
"magnus homo," whose "caput," or head, is the supercelestial or intelligible world,
while his "ignis," fire, or heart, is the celestial world or empyrean, and his
"fundamentum," or base, the sublunary sphere, all which are bound together "fœdere
bono," by ties of kinship and congruity. In plain English, then, the initial words of the
first chapter of Genesis mean, according to Pico:--"The Father in the Son, and by the
Son, who is the beginning and the end, or rest, created the head, the heart, and the
lower parts of the great man fitly joined together;" and thus contain an implicit
prophecy of the Christian dispensation.
After this splendid tour de force, everything else in Pico's exposition will seem
tame and trivial. We may observe, however, that four being a square number, he finds
in the fourth day an adumbration of the fullness of time in which Christ came to earth;
in the sun, moon, and stars types of Christ, His Church, and His Apostles; in the
waters under the firmament, which on the third day were gathered together unto one
place, a type of the Gentiles; in the earth, a type of the Israelites; and in the fact that
before the creation of the sun the waters produced nothing, and the earth little that was
good, while after the sun had shone upon them they became fruitful abundantly of
moving creatures, birds, and fishes, a prophecy of the spiritual revolution wrought by
Christianity -- were not the Apostles fishers of men? and a plain, unmistakable proof
that his exposition is no mere fancy, but solid truth. It is absurd to criticize such folly
seriously, but it may be worth while to note in passing that Christ being according to
Christian theology co-eternal with the Father, the creation of the sun serves but ill as a
type of His advent.
Pico, however, is so little disturbed by this consideration, that he finds another
type of Christ in another created object -- to wit, the firmament -- which, while
separating the waters above it from those below, nevertheless unites them as every
mean unites its extremes, and thus enables the former to fecundate the latter, as Christ
enables the divine grace to descend upon man. At the same time, however, he is
careful to affirm the orthodox position that Christ is the first begotten of every
creature.
Such are some of the meanings which Pico finds in the Mosaic text when
interpreting it of the creation of the intelligible or super-celestial sphere. The same
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
-20-
terms have, of course, quite different imports when applied to the creation of the other
spheres. Thus, in relation to the sublunary sphere, "heaven" means efficient cause,
"the earth" matter, and "the waters" on the face of which the Spirit of God moved, the
accidents of matter.
But the reader has probably had already far too much of these absurdities,
which, however, when due allowance has been made for the differences of the times,
are perhaps hardly grosser than some of the ingenious attempts by which more recent
writers have sought to reconcile Genesis with modern science.
It is time, however, to take a glance at the treatise "De Ente et Uno." This little
tractate purports to be an essay towards the reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle -- an
essentially hopeless undertaking, on which Porphyry had long before spent his
strength for nought. We may therefore spare ourselves the trouble of even asking how
far Pico is successful. The interest of the treatise consists in the insight which it
affords into Pico's own views of the nature of God and His relation to the world. It is,
in fact, a chapter, and by no means an unimportant chapter, in the long dialectic on the
nature of universals and their relation to particulars, which formed the staple of
mediæval thought. All cultivated people have heard of this great debate, but few have
any clear idea of the issues involved in it, and why so many subtle and ingenious
thinkers spent their best energies upon it. Nay, it is sometimes contemptuously
dismissed by those who should know better as mere piece of frivolous logomachy. In
truth, however, this apparently barren controversy was big with the most momentous
of all the problems with which the human mind can concern itself -- first, "Utrum sit
Deus"-- whether God exist? second, if He exist, in what way His relation to the
universe is to be understood -- whether in the way of a transcendent cause or an
immanent principle, or in both ways at once?
Saturated as mediaeval theology was with ideas derived from Plato and
Aristotle, and but imperfectly understood, it was inevitable that when men attempted
to philosophize about God, they should conceive Him -- or at any rate tend to
conceive Him -- rather as a universal principle, or archetypal source of ideas, than as a
concrete personality. Hence nominalism, with its frank denial of the existence of
universals, conceptualism with its reduction of them to figments of abstraction,
seemed equally to involve atheism; even realism of the more moderate type, which,
while asserting the objective existence of the universal, denied its existence ante rem -
- i.e., apart from the particular -- was viewed with suspicion as tending to merge God
in the cosmos; while realism of the high Platonic order, by its assertion of the
existence of a world of pure universals -- archetypes of the particulars revealed to
sense -- found favour in the eyes of men in whom the philosophic interest was always
strictly subordinated to the theological.
In the treatise "De Ente et Uno" the question as between the transcendence and
the immanence of God comes to the surface with remarkable abruptness. Is "the One,"
i.e.
God, to be regarded as "Being" or as "above Being?" Aristotle is supposed to
maintain the former position, Plato undoubtedly holds the latter. To the Platonic
doctrine Pico gives in his unqualified adhesion, and attempts to constrain Aristotle to
do so likewise. His Platonism is of the most uncompromising type, the idealism of the
Parmenides with the Parmenidean doubts and difficulties left out. Abstract terms such
as "whiteness "or "humanity" signify, he asserts dogmatically, and apparently without
a shadow of doubt as to the truth of the doctrine, real existences which are what they
are in their own right and not by derivation from or participation in anything else,