From Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists (1550) to Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), the Italian Renaissance has been seen because the age of the lone genius. Alongside Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the eccentric goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, the philosophical prodigy Giovanni Pico della Mirandola had confirmed a pre-eminent instance of the kind.
Born into the Aristocracy in 1463, Pico displayed a precocious expertise for studying. As a toddler he may reportedly recite Dante’s Commedia each forwards and backwards. He loved a meteoric rise to fame in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florence, the place he caught the eye of luminaries together with Marsilio Ficino and Angelo Poliziano. Aged 24, he arrived in Rome with an inventory of 900 theses, which he supplied to defend in opposition to all challengers. A few of Pico’s theses proved an excessive amount of for the papal authorities, and he fled to Paris. Returning to Florence, he settled all the way down to a lifetime of examine, however couldn’t assist however get caught up within the political upheavals that adopted Lorenzo’s dying in 1492. Pico helped deliver the controversial Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola to Florence, earlier than dying from a sudden and mysterious sickness, aged 31.
In Edward Wilson-Lee’s telling of this rambunctious life story, Pico stays an impulsive maverick. However a poster boy for individualism he’s not. Fairly the alternative: Pico’s philosophical enquiries have been underpinned by a deep uncertainty about particular person id and the issue of proving the separateness of 1 human from the larger complete of humanity. Pico was a synthesiser, looking for to deliver collectively all philosophical data into one common complete. Drawing on a big selection of sources – together with Plato, Averroes, and the Jewish kabbalist custom – Pico reopened the novel query of whether or not people actually have been explicit, impartial beings, or whether or not (in Wilson-Lee’s useful recurring picture) we’re just like the crest of a wave, which although showing particular person in actual fact type small elements of a larger oceanic complete. Pico provides proof that the Renaissance could possibly be about transcending individuality, moderately than the triumph of the person.
Trying past Florence, Wilson-Lee stresses the affect of Paris, the good centre of scholastic theology. Pico’s debt to medieval scholasticism challenges outdated assumptions in regards to the Renaissance, through which humanists rejected and displaced scholastics. Nonetheless too usually written off as pedantic quibbling about what number of angels may dance on the top of a pin, Pico’s writings as a substitute reveal a scholasticism that was intellectually adventurous, radical and – at instances – even harmful.
Removed from irrelevant abstractions, angels have been an important thought experiment which lay on the core of scholastic (and Pico’s) thought. In response to Aristotle, what makes people distinctive is the truth that they should reside alongside others: as he put it initially of his Politics, ‘man is a political animal’. Herein lay the essential distinction from instinct-driven animals (people may cooperate via speech and cause) and the right cause of gods (who had no want of others). For the scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas, working to make Aristotle in keeping with Christianity, gods (within the pagan plural) have been changed by angels. A step up from people within the divine hierarchy, angels have been unencumbered by fallible, sinful our bodies and represented a purer type of cause.
This was a framework which recommended a tantalising chance: may people – via the next philosophical understanding – turn into angels? Might they share in an ideal, common mind? All through this vigorous and trendy mental biography, Wilson-Lee traces Pico’s investigation of this query. The expertise is immersive: like Pico, the reader is thrown into multifarious philosophical contexts and traditions. Taking inspiration from anthropology as a lot as historical past, Wilson-Lee attracts comparisons between very totally different instances and locations. For example, we’re taken on a whistlestop tour of culturally different curiosity within the language of birds, from the Mixtecs to Icelandic epics, to the Brahmins of India. This units Pico’s curiosity within the language of angels – ‘fowl males’ – in broader context. Pico was entranced by types of language that transcend that means and cause, which pointed in direction of a common expertise, shared throughout all instances and locations.
Pico’s obsession with the ability of language explains his fascination with the enigmatic Savonarola, who urged his Florentine listeners to surrender vanities and reside purer non secular lives. The friar’s accusatory but beguiling preaching type had a mesmeric impact: it’s stated that the artist Botticelli was satisfied to burn his personal work. Right here was the ability of language writ massive. Pico died on the Dominican monastery of San Marco in 1494 and subsequently didn’t reside to see Savonarola’s fall, burnt as a fraud in 1498. By then, Florence’s second of mass spiritual hysteria had handed, and so too had Pico’s quest for common understanding.
For Wilson-Lee, Pico’s embrace of human oneness offers a invaluable counterpoint to a contemporary Western world through which individualism has turn into an unthinking norm. As Wilson-Lee factors out, over the span of historical past it has been much more widespread for people to place collective identities first. The joys of shedding oneself in a communal complete has a darkish historical past, mendacity on the coronary heart of Twentieth-century fascism. However the historic narrative outlined in The Grammar of Angels challenges us to ask if we have now now gone too far within the different course. Will we lack philosophical instruments for tackling genuinely communal challenges such because the Covid pandemic or local weather change? Maybe, Wilson-Lee suggests, by changing into extra attuned to this very human intuition ‘to dissolve the people in bigger teams and constructions’, we’d study to be extra discerning in regards to the communities we select to type. We’re not angels, however we are able to form our collective future.
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The Grammar of Angels: A Seek for the Magical Powers of Language
Edward Wilson-Lee
William Collins, 288pp, £35
Eloise Davies is Assistant Professor of Humanities on the College of Florida.
