THOMAS MORE et al.
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of the last who seriously and sincerely entertained the claims on men's faith of the
pagan religions; he is anxious to ascertain the true significance of the obscurest
legend, the lightest tradition concerning them. With many thoughts and many
influences which led him in that direction, he did not become a monk; only he became
gentle and patient in disputation; retaining "somewhat of the old plenty, in dainty
viand and silver vessel," he gave over the greater part of his property to his friend, the
mystical poet Beniveni, to be spent by him in works of charity, chiefly in the sweet
charity of providing marriage-dowries for the peasant girls of Florence. His end came
in 1494, when, amid the prayers and sacraments of Savonarola, he died of fever, on
the very day on which Charles the Eighth entered Florence, the seventeenth of
November, yet in the time of lilies--the lilies of the shield of France, as the people
now said, remembering Camilla's prophecy. He was buried in the cloister at Saint
Mark's, in the hood and white frock of the Dominican order.
It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest in the Dominican habit,
yet amid thoughts of the older gods, himself like one of those comely divinities,
reconciled indeed to the new religion, but still with a tenderness for the earlier life,
and desirous literally to "bind the ages each to each by natural piety"--it is because
this life is so perfect a parallel to the attempt made in his writings to reconcile
Christianity with the ideas of paganism, that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character
of those writings, is really interesting. Thus, in the Heptaplus, or Discourse on the
Seven Days of the Creation, he endeavours to reconcile the accounts which pagan
philosophy had given of the origin of the world with the account given in the books of
Moses--the Timæus of Plato with the book of Genesis. The Heptaplus is dedicated to
Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose interest, the preface tells us, in the secret wisdom of
Moses is well known. If Moses seems in his writings simple and even popular, rather
than either a philosopher or a theologian, that is because it was an institution with the
ancient philosophers, either not to speak of divine things at all, or to speak of them
dissemblingly: hence their doctrines were called mysteries. Taught by them,
Pythagoras became so great a "master of silence," and wrote almost nothing, thus
hiding the words of God in his heart, and speaking wisdom only among the perfect. In
explaining the harmony between Plato and Moses, Pico lays hold on every sort of
figure and analogy, on the double meanings of words, the symbols of the Jewish
ritual, the secondary meanings of obscure stories in the later Greek mythologists.
Everywhere there is an unbroken system of correspondences. Every object in the
terrestrial world is an analogue, a symbol or counterpart, of some higher reality in the
starry heavens, and this again of some law of the angelic life in the world beyond the
stars. There is the element of fire in the material world; the sun is the fire of heaven;
and in the super-celestial world there is the fire of the seraphic intelligence. "But
behold how they differ! The elementary fire burns, the heavenly fire vivifies, the
super-celestial fire loves." In this way, every natural object, every combination of
natural forces, every accident in the lives of men, is filled with higher meanings.
Omens, prophecies, supernatural coincidences, accompany Pico himself all through
life. There are oracles in every tree and mountain-top, and a significance in every
accidental combination of the events of life.
This constant tendency to symbolism and imagery gives Pico's work a figured
style, by which it has some real resemblance to Plato's, and he differs from other
mystical writers of his time by a real desire to know his authorities at first hand. He
reads Plato in Greek, Moses in Hebrew, and by this his work really belongs to the
higher culture. Above all, we have a constant sense in reading him, that his thoughts,
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
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however little their positive value may be, are connected with springs beneath them of
deep and passionate emotion; and when he explains the grades or steps by which the
soul passes from the love of a physical object to the love of unseen beauty, and
unfolds the analogies between this process and other movements upward of human
thought, there is a glow and vehemence in his words which remind one of the manner
in which his own brief existence flamed itself away.
I said that the Renaissance of the fifteenth century was in many things great,
rather by what it designed or aspired to do, than by what it actually achieved. It
remained for a later age to conceive the true method of effecting a scientific
reconciliation of Christian sentiment with the imagery, the legends, the theories about
the world, of pagan poetry and philosophy. For that age the only possible
reconciliation was an imaginative one, and resulted from the efforts of artists, trained
in Christian schools, to handle pagan subjects; and of this artistic reconciliation work
like Pico's was but the feebler counterpart. Whatever philosophers had to say on one
side or the other, whether they were successful or not in their attempts to reconcile the
old to the new, and to justify the expenditure of so much care and thought on the
dreams of a dead faith, the imagery of the Greek religion, the direct charm of its story,
were by artists valued and cultivated for their own sake. Hence a new sort of
mythology, with a tone and qualities of its own. When the ship-load of sacred earth
from the soil of Jerusalem was mingled with the common clay in the Campo Santo at
Pisa, a new flower grew up from it, unlike any flower men had seen before, the
anemone with its concentric rings of strangely blended colour, still to be found by
those who search long enough for it, in the long grass of the Maremma. Just such a
strange flower was that mythology of the Italian Renaissance, which grew up from the
mixture of two traditions, two sentiments, the sacred and the profane. Classical story
was regarded as so much imaginative material to be received and assimilated. It did
not come into men's minds to ask curiously of science concerning its origin, its
primary form and import, its meaning for those who projected it. It sank into their
minds, to issue forth again with all the tangle about it of medieval sentiment and
ideas. In the Doni Madonna in the Tribune of the Uffizii, Michelangelo actually
brings the pagan religion, and with it the unveiled human form, the sleepy-looking
fauns of a Dionysiac revel, into the presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters had
introduced there other products of the earth, birds or flowers; and he has given to that
Madonna herself much of the uncouth energy of the older and more primitive "Mighty
Mother."
It is because this picturesque union of contrasts, belonging properly to the art
of the close of the fifteenth century, pervades, in Pico della Mirandola, an actual
person, that the figure of Pico is so attractive. He will not let one go; he wins one on,
in spite of oneself, to turn again to the pages of his forgotten books, although we
know already that the actual solution proposed in them will satisfy us as little as
perhaps it satisfied him. It is said that in his eagerness for mysterious learning he once
paid a great sum for a collection of cabalistic manuscripts, which turned out to be
forgeries; and the story might well stand as a parable of all he ever seemed to gain in
the way of actual knowledge. He had sought knowledge, and passed from system to
system, and hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive knowledge than because
he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty in knowledge, which would come
down and unite what men's ignorance had divided, and renew what time had made
dim. And so, while his actual work has passed away, yet his own qualities are still
active, and he himself remains, as one alive in the grave, cæsiis et vigilibus oculis, as