38 The New York Review
than he sometimes pretended—de-
nounced Pico at still greater length. For
all his learning, Pico had lost himself in
a labyrinth even more monstrous than
those of the Kabbalah: the empty in-
tricacies of scholastic philosophy. “The
only thing worth the bother in this
immense undertaking,” Voltaire con-
cluded, “is a little elementary geometry
and astronomy. The rest just shows the
spirit of the times.”
But the most destructive of the critics,
in principle at least, was Kant. Though
Kant didn’t discuss Pico in particu-
lar, his denunciations of Schwärmerei
(religious enthusiasm) provided the
grounds for a devastating critique of
Pico’s passion for dubious ancient rev-
elations. Copenhaver analyzes the ar-
guments of Pico’s critics with precision
and panache, setting thinkers little-
known in the English- speaking world
into context and making clear that
their ideas, as well as those of Voltaire
and Kant, had a real impact.
Kant did much more than state rea-
sons for distrusting Pico. He was one
of the two writers who made it possible
for a distortion of Pico’s thought to be-
come a centerpiece in interpretations
of Renaissance intellectual history
and culture. Kant argued, in terms that
have echoed down the centuries, that
dignity is “an absolute inner value,”
possessed only by morality, and by hu-
manity to the extent that it is morally
capable. Each human owes it to every
other human to consider him or her
“not merely as a means to ends... but
as an end in itself,” a fellow human who
“possesses an inalienable dignity.”
In 1860 Jacob Burckhardt, a historian
rather than a philosopher, published
The Civilization of the Renaissance in
Italy, a uniquely inspiring cultural his-
tory that has shaped research for more
than a century and a half. His work was
a mosaic: from anecdotes and songs,
state institutions and public carnivals,
he pieced together a glowing image of
the Italians as the “first- born of the
modern world,” the first to see both
the world around them and their own
selves objectively. Italians, he argued,
claimed a new freedom, which enabled
all of them—peasants as well as lords,
women as well as men—to move from
one social order or place to another:
to plan and make their own way in the
world. Burckhardt did not offer a full
portrait, much less an analysis, of Pico,
but he pulled bright anecdotes from his
life and writings to support his vision of
the Renaissance. His Pico, who praised
human freedom and rejected astrolog-
ical determinism, was in perfect tune
with the world around him.
In the twentieth century, as scholar-
ship on the Renaissance exploded in
volume, Burckhardt and others moved
Italian philosophers and historians to
investigate Pico’s thought. Copenhaver
has a deep command of modern Italian
intellectual history, which gives this
part of his work special value. Again
and again Italian thinkers set out to
show—as the great intellectual histo-
rian Eugenio Garin did in his influential
book Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,
published just before World War II—
that the reassertion of human freedom
was at the core of Pico’s philosophy.
Meanwhile, German émigrés in the US,
above all Ernst Cassirer and Paul Oskar
Kristeller, found in Pico a prophet of
Kantian critical thinking and belief in
the dignity of the individual. Fragments
of Burckhardt and Kant, Copenhaver
shows, floated between these erudite,
precise readers and Pico’s texts.
Even Kristeller, a master philologist
and historian, presented Pico in partly
anachronistic terms in his introduction
to the translation of the oration that gen-
erations of English- speaking students
have read. The conventional wisdom
ruled for generations. New movements
in philosophy—such as existentialism—
stirred Garin and others not to see more
distance between Pico and their own
time but to find seeds of these newer
forms of modern morality in his thought.
True, some scholars called attention
to the elements in Pico’s thought that
these interpretations ignored. Eugenio
Anagnine teased out the vital impor-
tance of the Kabbalah. Avery Dulles, a
Harvard undergraduate who would be-
come a Jesuit and a cardinal, revealed
in a Phi Beta Kappa–prize essay that
Pico had steeped himself in scholastic
philosophy. Both contributions were
treated as marginal to Pico studies
for decades. Only in the 1980s—when
a new generation of scholars began to
explore the craggy mass of Pico’s texts,
some of them written in haste or left
unfinished, and to clear away the ivy
of secondary literature that had grown
over them—did a new picture begin to
emerge. Copenhaver has been at the
forefront of this movement, and in his
account the mighty are brought down
from their seats and the revisionists
come into their own.
One revisionist in particular plays
a central part in this story. Chaim
Wirszubski, who emigrated from Vilna
to Palestine, joined the group of students
around Gershom Scholem in the 1930s,
and took part in their exploration of
the tradition of Kabbalah. A classicist,
Wirszubski devoted his dissertation to
the concept of libertas (freedom) in late
Republican Rome. He found the key to
Pico’s thought, however, not in Cicero-
nian dignitas but in Pico’s contact with
Jewish tradition. Sharing Scholem’s
interest in Christians who had studied
the Kabbalah, Wirszubski followed a
trail to Pico that few others had traveled
since the seventeenth century. It had
long been known that Pico had received
lessons in Hebrew and other languages
from a spectacularly colorful figure:
Flavius Mithridates, a Sicilian Jew who
converted to Christianity and, in the
best humanist fashion, gave himself a
classical name: that of King Mithridates
VI Eupator Dionysus of Pontus, who,
according to the Roman polymath Pliny
the Elder, could speak all the languages
of the twenty- two peoples he governed.
As that period form of self-
advertisement suggests, Mithridates
was a polyglot. Invited by Pope Sixtus
IV to give an oration in the Vatican on
Good Friday, he spoke for two hours,
charming his audience with his elegant
pronunciation of Aramaic and Hebrew.
He then traveled north to the Holy
Roman Empire, where he earned “a
large heap of money” from his lectures
on the poetic books of the Hebrew
Bible, though he left his audiences com-
pletely bewildered. Flavius returned to
Italy just when Pico decided he needed
access to the mysteries of Jewish and
Islamic thought.It was a match characteristic of its time:
not of an abstract Renaissance but of a
complex Mediterranean world set intonew forms of motion by the rise of Ot-
toman power and the expulsion of Jews
and Muslims from Iberia and southern
Italy. Expert translators were involved
in diplomacy and scholarship. Flavius
could not only read and interpret the
densely allegorical and allusive works of
the Kabbalists, but also translate them
into Latin. He did this for Pico. Flavius
had spiced his Good Friday oration with
quotations from a fictional “Old Tal-
mud” that underlined the similarities
between Judaism, properly understood,
and Christianity. After many years as a
Christian, he now translated the Kab-
balistic texts in ways that subtly made
them compatible with Christianity.
At the same time, Flavius tormented
his patron. In notes in the manuscriptshe would give Pico useful informa-
tion: for example, that certain Hebrew
marginalia were not by him. He would
also brag (“No one but Mithridates
could have translated this text from
Hebrew, it’s so obscure”), taunt (“A
great secret, but you won’t understand
without me”), and demand (“This is in
Chaldean [Aramaic], which Pico will
never know unless that handsome boy
[whom, supposedly, Pico had promised
to provide] arrives”). He nonetheless
provided Pico with hundreds of pages
of Kabbalistic material that would oth-
erwise have been totally inaccessible.
Wirszubski died before he could fin-
ish his extraordinary book Pico della
Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish
Mysticism. Published posthumously,
it offers the reader immense rewards,
but requires that great effort be made
to attain them. Still, he opened the way
to seeing Pico’s work not in the grand,
ahistorical manner that had been com-
mon in the past, but by setting it into
the local, short- term conditions in
which humans actually live, think, and
write. Pico composed the final form of
his nine hundred theses and his oration
in 1486, in a burst of enthusiasm that
would have terrified Kant, while also
learning to read and write Hebrew, ar-
guing with Flavius, and ransacking the
shelves of the Vatican Library.
Between Pico’s own desire to tease
and mystify his audience in the oration
and the density and complexity of his
sources, working out what he actually
thought poses the historian tremen-
dous challenges. Every page of Copen-
haver’s reading of the text bristles with
detail as he weaves a network of con-nections between the oration and the
theses and between both and their Jew-
ish (and non- Jewish) sources, recon-
structing the practices of interpretation
and incantation that Pico hoped a few
of his listeners might adopt.
When Pico had Job say, in the oration,
that God wants peace from the angels,
he was actually thinking, as one of his
theses shows, of “the Southern Water,
the Northern Fire, and their Command-
ers,” Michael and Gabriel, and their
reconciliation on the heights of heaven
(“shamayim [heaven] as ’esh [fire] +
mayim [water]”), as well as of the angels
who appear within the world as “birds
of heaven” and give humans wisdom.
Here he fused ideas from the sage Ger-
sonides, Rabbi Levi ben Gerson—who
was not a Kabbalist—with Kabbalist
angel lore. Long tracts of the oration are
even more densely allusive, and some
are intelligible only when connected
to forms of higher magic that manipu-
late the Hebrew letters, which are also
numbers. Copenhaver examines the
implications of passage after passage
with extraordinary rigor and clarity.In some ways, both Pico and Mithri-
dates are typical figures of the late-
fifteenth- century Roman landscape. In
the last decade of that century, proph-
ets of strange revelations stalked the
city’s narrow streets. The plague doctor
Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio rode
a white donkey to St. Peter’s Basilica,
wearing a bloody crown of thorns and
a silver plate that identified him as Pi-
mander, one of the speakers in the di-
alogues of the Hermetic Corpus. The
Dominican theologian Giovanni Nanni
da Viterbo published in 1498 a mass of
texts and commentary designed to re-
write the history of the world. He pur-
ported to prove that Noah had also been
Janus, claiming that after Noah landed
at Ararat, he made his way up the Tiber
and gave the Janiculum hill its name.
More generally, he argued that the
Greeks and Romans had lied about
world history, which must be learned
from Chaldean and Egyptian histori-
ans whom he had rediscovered (in re-
ality, he had forged them). Revelations
were a ducat a dozen. And Nanni’s
revelations were as novel and striking
as Pico’s. He too claimed that he had
learned from the Jews: from the boys
with whom he had attended Hebrew
school in Viterbo, from “Samuel the
Talmudist,” the informant who gave
him wrong etymologies for Hebrew
names, and from the friendly rabbis
with whom he spent time every Easter
week (none of these figures, in all prob-
ability, was real). Yet Nanni genuinely
drew material from the Talmud, the
great code of Jewish law, and treated
it with the respect due a major ancient
source, as Pico treated the Kabbalah.
Pico’s experience differed from
Nanni’s in one vital respect: his infor-
mant actually existed. How far Flavius
shaped Pico’s understanding of Jew-
ish tradition is gradually becoming
clear as his translations are published,
translated, and explicated, thanks to a
project based at the Free University of
Berlin. Flavius introduced Pico to the
thought of the thirteenth- century Span-
ish writer Abraham Abulafia, from
whom he learned to divide the tradition
of Kabbalah into practical and specu-
lative forms. Starting from this point,
Copenhaver toggles back and forth
between Pico’s oration, his theses, andAbraham Abulafia; from a manuscript of
his Kabbalist meditation manual
The Light of the Intellect, 1285VaticanLibrary