The birth day of venus: Pico as platonic exegete in the commento and the heptaplus

Abstract

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) was the wunderkind among Italian Renaissance philosophers and a key figure, along with Cusanus, Bessarion, and Ficino, in the revival of Platonic metaphysics, though he was not a devout Neoplatonist like Ficino but rather an Aristotelian by training and in many ways an eclectic by conviction. Nonetheless, he plunged as hardly more than a youth into the works of Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, and other Neoplatonists, notably in the fifteen months or so he spent in Florence from the spring of 1484 to the summer of 1485, where he acquired a rare understanding of the Platonists' methodology, central postulates, and metaphysical distinctions. This Platonic education was succeeded by nine months in Paris (July 1485 to March 1486) and was subsequently harnessed to an encyclopedic, ambitious, essentially Aristotelian plan. This was to gather together an array of Egyptian, Chaldean, Greek, Hebrew (including Cabalistic), patristic, and scholastic (including Arab) propositions rather than arguments or proofs as such - an array which eventually amounted to 900 conclusions, 900 being the numerological symbol of the soul's ecstatic return to itself in philosophical study - and to defend them in Rome. The event would take place early in 1487 in what he called a “council” but which would be in effect a grand Parisian disputatio, and it would include, he hoped, the pope, the College of Cardinals, and a number of eminent theologians and philosophers (whose expenses he would cover!).